Some 25km west of Penonome on the Interamericana, the Parque Arqueologico El Cano is the most impressive pre-Columbian site in Panama - though that's not saying very much, and compared to the Maya wonders elsewhere in Central America there's very little to see. An important ceremonial site from 500 to about 1200 AD, El Cano later became a cemetery that was still in use after the Conquest - horse remains have been found in some of the tombs - but the hundreds of stone statues that formed what was described as the "Temple of the Thousand Idols" were illegally decapitated by US archeologist Hyatt Verril in the early twentieth century, and the best of their zoomorphic and anthropomorphic heads are now in New York. Set amid cornfields and plagued by mosquitoes, the site consists of several funeral mounds, one of which is excavated and open to view, and lines of decapitated standing stones whose significance can only be speculated - some believe they were part of an astronomical observatory.
