Gamboa is a small town in corregimiento of Cristóbal in the Colón Province, Panama close to the Panama Canal and the Chagres River. It was one of a handful of permanent Canal Zone townships, built to house employees of the Panama Canal and their dependents. The name Gamboa is the name of a tree of the quince family.

Gamboa is considered an attractive location for ecotourism.

Gamboa is located on a sharp bend of the Chagres River at the point which feeds Lake Gatun. Just south of Gamboa, Lake Gatun and the Chagres meet the Culebra Cut (Gaillard Cut) where the Canal cuts through the Continental Divide. Thus, though Gamboa is closer to the Pacific side of Panama, its watershed is on the Atlantic side. A single lane iron and wood bridge that crossed the Chagres and was the only road access to Gamboa for most of its history. This bridge is still intact today, but in October 2018 a new 2-lane bridge was completed near the original site.

Gamboa was built near the site of the former village of Santa Cruz. Three miles further up the Chagres river was the town of Las Cruces, where 19th-century travelers and cargo disembarked from river barges to take the overland Las Cruces trail by mule. After the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855, the railroad ran near the area, but made no stops and no PR maps list any towns in Gamboa's present location.

Present-day Gamboa was built in 1911, during Canal construction. It was initially populated by "silver roll" (i.e., Afro-Antilleans and other non-US, non-white) workers and their dependents. These initial settlers, counted at around 700, had previously lived in the construction areas between the former towns of Tabernilla and Gorgona, which were covered by Lake Gatun as Canal construction advanced. No Americans were counted amongst the town's first inhabitants.

By 1914, at the conclusion of Canal construction activities, Gamboa's population decreased to 173 and the town consisted of a police station, a four-family house which had been brought in from the former town of Empire, and a two-family house brought from the former town of Culebra, and several old railroad box cars used to house silver roll employees. The first commissary, operated by a division of the Panama Canal Company/Canal Zone Government, also operated out of three box cars.

After many years of studies and debates, and lobbying by Dredging Division Superintendent John G. Claybourn, the Panama Canal Company moved its Dredging Division from the town of Paraíso to Gamboa in 1936. In 1933, when a three-man board appointed by Canal Zone Governor J.L. Schley studied the feasibility of moving the Dredging Division to Gamboa, the population was 251, including just 10 Americans. The first Dredging Division families began moving into the newly built town of Gamboa in September 1936. Within a year, the town's population jumped to 1,419 and by 1942, the town reached its peak population—3,853.

The new residents of Gamboa built their civic center with their own hands and funds. It was initially used as a USO to entertain troops stationed in nearby hills, but later became headquarters of the Civic Council. The Civic Council and Gamboa's residents also built the Gamboa Golf and Country Club, on the Gamboa Ridge, overlooking the Chagres river. The men in the town hammered, sawed and poured concrete while the women brought picnic lunches and tended barbecues. The club was officially opened on January 1, 1939, and eventually included a 9-hole golf course.