Ciudad del Saber — Panama's 25-Year Conversion of a Former U.S. Military Base into an Innovation District

Ciudad del Saber (City of Knowledge) is a mixed-use innovation district built on land reverted from the former U.S. Fort Clayton military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Run by the private non-profit Fundación Ciudad del Saber since 1999, it combines business incubation, higher-education programmes and offices for international organisations on a single campus, making it one of the longest-running innovation-district conversions in Latin America.
According to 25th-anniversary reporting by three independent Panamanian outlets (La Prensa, Panamá América and La Estrella de Panamá) in 2024: the campus incubated more than 300 startups over the preceding five years, generating combined revenue over $21 million, mentored 13,000+ entrepreneurs and trained 8,000 women; ecosystem organisations on campus registered $783.6 million in gross production value and contributed $314 million in value-added to GDP that year; and the campus currently hosts 34 international organisations, 135 innovation/tech/education organisations and 25+ academic programmes.
Caveat: Ciudad del Saber is a private foundation-led public-private conversion rather than a government-run programme, and the quantified figures found come from local press reporting on foundation/ecosystem-supplied data rather than an independent economic-impact audit; no direct replication of the specific base-conversion model elsewhere was found in the sources reviewed.

Read the full analysis: https://ciudaddelsaber.org/en/what-is-ciudad-del-saber