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Do we know the exact place in Panama where Vasco Núñez de Balboa first saw the South Ocean?

(If so, do we have a picture of this place where he saw the two oceans at the same time?)

In Decisive Moments in History from Stefan Zweig, it is written that Balboa and his men built at this location a Christian cross with the initials of the King of Spain. Is the cross still there or is there some monument that marks this point?

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  • The cross was most likely wooden, and so would have rotted away.
    – Spencer
    May 5, 2020 at 13:34

2 Answers 2

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The place is not known with certainty, but some googling revealed two possible candidates:

One of them is Pechito Parado, a mountain near a very small village named Quebrada Eusebio. This place was visited by a group of young people in the Ruta Quetzal BBVA, a cultural exchange program, on the anniversary of the discovery in 2013 (more info, in Spanish, in this Spanish newspaper).

The other candidate is a mountain named Urrucallala and is mentioned in some academical journals such as Ángel Rubio's La ruta de Balboa y el descubrimiento del Océano Pacífico (1965) and an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review (1967), both in snippet view so I can't read them in full. Rubio, however, mentions both mountains and says they were very close to each other.

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  • 1
    This answer is good enough that it convinced me to upvote the question too.
    – T.E.D.
    Jul 26, 2016 at 20:48
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According to Wikipedia articles both in English and Spanish that spot was the top of a mountain.

Britannica mentions “a peak in Darién” around quotes.

“A peak in Darién” is also the end of a poem of John Keats, in which he (wrongly) attributes the discovery to Hernán Cortés.

So it seems the name of the mountain or peak is not recorded.

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