This plaza opens to the sea air at the tip of the peninsula, where Casco Viejo meets the bottle-green bay. Originally it supported a fort that was torn down at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, it was renamed in honour of the French and their pioneering attempt to construct the canal.

Shaded by jacaranda and palms, the plaza is dominated by a pencil thin obelisk crowned by al Gallic cockerel and guarded at its base by bronze busts of Ferdinand de Lesseps and four other figures prominent in the French effort to build a canal.

In rough weather, waves crash against the eastern seawall; in Spanish colonial days, condemned convicts were chained to this wall and drowned.