The overwhelming majority of Panamanians are the product of varying degrees of admixture between European ethnic groups (predominantly Spaniards) with native Amerindians (who are indigenous to Panama's modern territory) and Black Africans.

The descendants of the Africans who arrived during the colonial era are intermixed in the general population or live in small Afro-Panamanian communities along the Atlantic Coast and in villages within the Darién jungle.

Most of the people in Darien are fishermen or small-scale farmers growing crops such as bananas, rice and coffee as well as raising livestock.

Other Afro-Panamanians descend from later migrants from the Caribbean who came to work on railroad-construction projects, commercial agricultural enterprises, and (especially) the canal.

Another region with a large Afro-Caribbean population is the province of Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast just south of Costa Rica.

[6] Most of the Panamanian population of West Indian descent owe their presence in the country to the monumental efforts to build the Panama Canal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Three-quarters of the 50,000 workers who built the canal were Afro Caribbean migrants from the British West Indies.

Other ancestries includes Dutch, English, French, German, Swiss, Danish, Irish, Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian.