The Almanaque Azul (blue almanac) was born in 2005 as a web-based guide to Panama’s beaches. Smartphones didn’t exist yet, the most important social network was MySpace, and the typical screen resolution was 1024x768. I made the website using WordPress, which had just been born, went to explore the beaches with a camera and a notebook, and wrote the articles. We needed someone willing to make maps for free (we had no money), and of course we couldn’t find anyone. So I sat down and typed “how to make maps” into Google.

I made my first maps using georeferenced pictures of official paper maps of Panama and Landsat satellite images superimposed in Inkscape. In 2005, the free version of Google Earth came out, but the images of Panama were still low resolution. A couple of years later I installed version 0.8 of Quantum GIS (today QGIS).

The first edition of the Almanaque Azul travel guide came out in 2012, after 4 years of work involving dozens of volunteer explorers, covering all of Panama, not just the beaches. When I made the maps we still didn’t know if we were going to print them in color or black and white. Making them monochrome was a great learning experience. For the second edition in 2017 I made the maps again

The Almanaque Azul is a small book, with pages measuring 12.7 cm × 17.8 cm (5" x 7"), and the maps had to work at that scale.

We also included small maps of the city's neighborhoods.

The two editions of the Almanaque Azul travel guide were very complex projects. The books have more than 100 controbutors each, including volunteers who traveled all over Panama to research the content, photographers who donated their work, those we commissioned to write articles, and those who participated in editing and proofreading. After finishing the second edition, we did a crowdfunding campaign and raised more than 20 thousand dollars for printing. The Almanaque Azul was received with much love by the people of Panama and the visitors who got it. All of this was driven by the other founder of our collective, Miriam Pons, and me. After all these years we are thinking about making a new edition of this guide.

You can buy the Almanaque Azul here in paper and the ebook on Amazon.