Bocas del Toro — Bastimentos Island

Red Frog Beach on Bastimentos Island is reached by a twenty-minute boat ride from Bocas Town, and the approach tells you everything: the water ahead turns from deep blue to turquoise to almost white as the reef shallows beneath it, and the beach itself materialises as a perfect crescent of powder-fine sand backed by jungle that comes right to the waterline.

The beach is named for the strawberry poison-dart frogs — tiny, vivid red amphibians the size of a thumbnail — that live in the leaf litter behind the dune and are completely harmless to humans despite their alarming colouring, a fact that the park's signage explains carefully and that every child who visits seems to find either fascinating or disappointing depending on their prior expectations of what a poisonous frog should do.

Surfing is the primary draw for many visitors: the point break at the north end of Red Frog Beach works best at mid to high tide and handles everything from beginner whitewater to occasional overhead sets on a big swell, while the inner reef offers a gentler whitewater wave for those still learning the mechanics of standing up.

The coral reef that runs along the entire eastern side of Bastimentos is accessible from the beach at low tide by walking out 50 to 100 metres on the flat reef flat, where brain corals the size of car tyres and giant staghorn formations provide shelter for hundreds of species of reef fish whose names only a marine biologist could list, though their electric colours — electric blue tangs, midnight parrotfish, flame scallops the colour of an ember — need no translation.

Bocas Town on Isla Colón, the archipelago's administrative centre and the usual point of arrival, is a single road town of golf carts, wooden houses on stilts and small restaurants serving coconut rice and fried fish that tastes of the sea it came from, and its deliberate slowness — everything runs on island time — is either the thing that makes it charming or the thing that makes it frustrating, depending on how badly you need to be somewhere.

The Zapatilla Islands, a pair of uninhabited islands within the Bastimentos Island marine national park, are the archipelago's most pristine beaches: an hour's boat ride from Bocas Town and reachable only by water, they offer the experience of a completely uninhabited Caribbean beach at its most idealised — blinding white sand, shade from sea grape trees, no sound except the waves and the boat's engine coming and going.

What makes Bocas del Toro feel genuinely different from other Caribbean beach destinations is the combination of the reef, the surf and the fact that the islands are still poor enough that the infrastructure is basic but not resort-fake, and the Caribbean coast here has a rawness that more developed destinations have polished away: the smell of the mangrove channels, the sound of howler monkeys in the forest behind the beach, the sight of the moon rising over the water turning the whole bay silver.

Bocas del Toro has some of the healthiest coral reefs in the Caribbean Basin, with over 50 species of coral and more than 500 species of reef fish documented in the archipelago.

Red Frog Beach is consistently ranked among the most beautiful beaches in Central America and offers a combination of surf, snorkelling and forest trails that few beach destinations can match in such a compact area.

The Bastimentos Island marine national park protects the archipelago's reefs, mangroves and forest — a rare triple ecosystem in a single administrative zone.