Panama Map

Panama is the last link in the chain of land that joins North and South America, an S-shaped isthmus that runs east and west rather than north and south. The western half of the country, painted in the broad greens around David and Santiago, is the mountain spine of the Cordillera Central and the Pacific plains below it, with the Azuero Peninsula, Chitré and Las Tablas bulging south into the sea. On the Caribbean side, the coast opens into the Archipelago de Bocas and the Laguna de Chiriquí. In the middle is the Panama Canal, running from Colón to Panama City past Gamboa and the rainforests of Soberanía and Chagres National Parks, which protect the watershed that keeps the canal full of water.

The isthmus rose from the sea about three million years ago, and when it closed, animals began to cross in both directions, opossums and armadillos moving north, cats and deer moving south, in what biologists call the Great American Biotic Interchange. Panama is still the crossing point. East of the canal, the land narrows and grows wilder. Along the Caribbean shore lie the San Blas Islands, home of the Guna, and inland are Lago Bayano and the Darién, the roadless jungle where the Pan-American Highway stops. It was near the Gulf of San Miguel, between La Palma and Garachiné, that Balboa’s expedition reached the Pacific in 1513. Offshore, the Pearl Archipelago lies in the Gulf of Panama, and farther west, Isla de Coiba, the largest island in Central America and once a prison colony, is now a national park.

My Travels in Panama

My travels in Panama have taken me to both coasts. In Bocas del Toro, I stayed with my wife and son on Isla Bastimentos and went looking for its strawberry poison frogs in Barefoot in Salt Creek. A cargo plane carried me to the islands of Guna Yala for The San Blas Islands, and from a canopy tower in Soberanía I wrote my Letters from the Canopy. In the mountains west of the canal, I waded the streams of an old volcanic crater at night for The Wise Glass Frog of El Valle de Antón.