Usually when we highlight a hotel on this luxury travel blog, it’s because we’ve just posted a detailed review of it on the website. In this case, the review is coming in a couple months but we’re welcoming a new advertising partner Las Clementinas. It’s a boutique hotel in the heart of historic Panama City, Panama.

We’re thrilled that these guys have appeared on the scene because while we love the gleam and gloss of Panama’s thriving capital city, it’s nice to wander through a sleepier part of town where everything is on more of a human scale. That’s the Casco Viejo section, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. No high-rises here and very little traffic. You can dine at an outdoor cafe without getting exhaust in your face.

Las Clementinas has six large “chambers” with all the amenities you’d expect, plus a kitchen and a sofa bed. They’re like small apartments, with a separate bedroom. There’s a roof deck up top and a cafe/bar with a garden area on site.

Nearby is their sister property, Canal House, which is a three-room luxury guesthouse in a building dating to 1893.

If you book three nights or more a Las Celentinas, they’ll even pick you up that the airport. Tocumen International is way on the other side of the city, so this is a nice perk.

Watch for a combined review of these two properties after one of our correspondents visits in late March. If you’re headed to Panama City before that and your tastes run more to small luxury inns rather than towers of steel and glass, check out Las Clementinas and Canal House.

If you do want something larger, see our reviews of the best luxury hotels in Panama.

Although luxury real estate is by nature expensive in any country, there can be a huge variance from place to place. I had a bizarre juxtaposition illustration of this a couple weeks ago when I watched two House Hunters International shows back to back. In the first, a couple was looking for a beachfront home in Ecuador. All three choices were fabulous and all were under $200,000. The next show I watched had a couple looking for a French home in Provence. Their budget was $1.2 million and every place was a fixer-upper dump. Once didn’t even have a bathroom!

Most of Latin America falls somewhere near the bargain end of that scale. Apart from a few exceptions like Rio de Janeiro and maybe Santiago, what you get for your money is going to be a better value than what you could find in the U.S. or Canada when it comes time to buy a luxury vacation home or a retirement home. Sometimes a much better value.

Apart from real estate though, what’s it really cost to live in these places? Answering that question is not as simple, but International Living is doing its best to help. They have just released a series of detailed budgets which give a break-down of all the major outgoings on a monthly basis in some of the world’s favorite overseas retirement hotspots.

All of them are places we cover here in Luxury Latin America: Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize, Panama, Ecuador and Roatan in Honduras.

They include information on things like rent, utilities, entertainment, health care and groceries, as well as tips and pointers on how to make retirees’ money stretch further.

“Most of us think about living the good life abroad but things rarely develop beyond a daydream,” said International Living magazine editor Eoin Bassett. “Resources like this can help equip readers with the information they need to bring those dreams to reality.”

The figures were put together by International Living contributors on the ground in each of the seven retirement hotspots, so this info is much more reliable than what you’ll find in a Mercer cost of living study, for instance.

“This 4,000-plus word article is a massively useful tool for anyone considering retirement overseas,” added Eoin. “But it’s really just one among many must-read resources we provide on everything from budgeting for a life abroad and buying a beachside bargain property, to getting the best deal on dental treatment or setting up a small business.”

I’m a subscriber to International Living and think it’s well worth the money. This report is free though. You can see the entire article here: Seven Easy, Affordable Retirement Spots.

It’s been in the news ever since we launched Luxury Latin America several years ago, and for good reason: the Trump tower in Panama City, Panama was either going to succeed in a stupendous fashion or fall apart in a stupendous fashion. Anything in the middle would not be worthy of the Trump name.

Fortunately for everyone, especially Panama, the new Trump Ocean Club is as spectacular as promised. With more than 80% of the residences sold before construction was complete, it’s on solid footing.

I first wrote about the opening of this building at the end of May when I interviewed Donald Trump, Jr. inside one of the residences there. He wouldn’t give any hints on where the next project in Latin America might be. You can’t blame him since the developers collectively spent close to $450 million on this one. They’ve got to make some money back.

As you can imagine, that kind of money gets you some very nice digs. It’s safe to say nobody is going to be challenging this hotel for a good while when it comes to facilities, furnishings, or fab factor. The quality of materials in this hotel is simply unmatched elsewhere in the country. You’d have to go pretty far in any direction on the map to find anything close and since this is the tallest building in Latin America now, it’ll be looking down on competitors until someone else can muster up enough investors to top it.

Besides all that, you’ve got plenty of other superlatives in place and coming. The Tejas restaurant, with its Spanish chef, will certainly top the restaurant ratings soon. The pool complex and adjoining hip lounge will be a magnet for fashion shoots. The private island beach club will be the hot getaway. The casino will surely be the largest and most impressive in the city. And on it goes.

It’s big, bold, and brash, but with a 1-to-1 guest ratio to make sure you still feel special.

See our full review of the Trump Ocean Club Hotel in Panama.

Our previous blog post pointed to our story on the hot real estate market in Panama City, but what if you just want to visit?

Panama has always been an also-ran when it comes to tourism, with the bulk of their inbound arrivals coming for business, not pleasure. The national tourism bureau has not done much to reach out to travel writers and editors and most of their budget has seemingly gone into wacky ad slogans and “special advertising sections” that nobody reads.

The situation is getting better though. The new ad slogan is a big improvement. Panama: Where the World Meets actually makes sense and is unique. The official tourism website is updated regularly and makes you want to visit. Here are some new developments:

* The hotel situation in the capital has improved drastically in the past few years and more notable upscale projects are going up soon, including a Westin just outside the capital and a Waldorf-Astoria in the center.

* Copa Airlines keeps adding new flights and new destinations from their Panama hub, with Brasilia being the latest. You can get to Panama direct from six U.S. airports plus Toronto. If you are flying somewhere else through Panama, you can stop off for a few days with no extra charges. You need to book it on the phone though—this doesn’t work online.

* KLM, Iberia, and Condor now offer direct flights to Panama from Europe.

* Panama’s airport gets better each time I visit. The first time it came off as a dingy shopping mall past its prime. The next time it looked like a clean shopping mall with no place to eat. On my most recent trip, it was starting to feel like a real international airport, with an ample executive lounge, a bar, more than one place to get a bite to eat, and Wi-Fi. Sure, the duty-free shops still dominate, but that’s what a lot of Latinos want: this is a place where they can get electronics and designer goods at prices close to what they are in the U.S., which is a rarity in Latin America. See more at their website.

* Here’s a big weight off your shoulders: all visitors to Panama get a card at the airport which gives them free health insurance for 30 days. Simply show your passport if you get injured and you’re covered (up to $7,000).  See the details here.

* Boquete has a new golf course. The 18-hole championship course Cielo Paraiso opened this past May. At 3,000 feet and surrounded by greenery of a mountain slope, this will be a big draw for the area.

See tour stories, luxury hotel reviews, and real estate round-ups in our luxury travel in Panama section.

Our latest real estate feature is on the bustling, red-hot market of Panama City, Panama.

If the fundamentals weren’t so strong, this would be looking like a bubble. It did take a slight breather when the U.S. recession hit, but unlike other Latin American retirement markets that depended on the yankees, this one is more diverse. Many of the buyers the past five years have been part of the “Chavez effect”: wealthy people moving their money out of Venezuela (and others that look to be headed that direction, like Bolivia). Other buyers are Latinos from countries where the political situation is more business-friendly, but they want to own property in this crossroads of the Americas, a stable country with a good banking system.

And of course Europeans, Canadians, and Americans are still a big part of the mix, especially those who like the combination of business opportunities, moving incentives, and the ability to keep their money in a place where it won’t get taxed heavily.

So while prices here are lower than they would be in other major world banking and commerce capitals (lower even than Mumbai, India, for example) you’re not going to swoop in and find fire sale bargain. Skyscrapers are selling out half or more of their units before the building is completed. The new Trump Ocean Club, which is a sail-shaped structure like the Burj Dubai, sold more than 80 percent before the doors opened, despite a price range of $250K to $1 million. The Yoo complex, with interiors by Philippe Starck, is seeing similar pre-sale numbers.

The Trump tower topped everything south of the U.S. for height, at 284 meters. Panama City now has the three tallest skyscrapers in Latin America. With the canal and protected forest on one side, the ocean on the other, there’s nowhere to go but up!

See the full story here: Luxury Real Estate in Panama City, Panama.

Our Trump hotel review isn’t up yet (it just opened its doors last week), but here are links to all the reviews of the best luxury hotels in Panama.