Coiba National Park

The approach by boat from Santa Catalina takes about 90 minutes in a small open launch, and the crossing is a slow reveal: the mainland coast drops away to the south and the island of Coiba grows from a dark green smudge on the horizon into a mountain range of volcanic origin that rises to 1,388 metres at the summit of Mount Coiba, its slopes covered in forest that comes right down to the waterline in a way that almost no inhabited coast in Central America still does.

Coiba's geological story is the key to its biological distinctiveness: when sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age, the island was cut off from the mainland roughly 12,000 to 18,000 years ago, and the plants and animals stranded on it by the rising water began a separate evolutionary journey that produced at least 30 endemic subspecies found nowhere else, including the Coiba Island howler monkey, the Coiba agouti and the Coiba spinetail, a small bird whose closest relative lives 600 kilometres away in Ecuador.

Underwater, the park's marine environment is even more remarkable: Coiba sits at the intersection of the Coco Plate and the Caribbean Plate, and the resulting upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep supports a marine ecosystem of exceptional diversity, with more than 750 species of fish and 63 species of coral recorded in its waters — comparable to the Galápagos and among the richest in the Eastern Pacific.

The diving at Coiba rewards patience and a good guide: the outer reef walls drop to 40 metres or more, with giant manta rays that cruise the thermocline on the right currents, hammerhead sharks on the deeper sites, and on the shallower reefs clouds of glassy sweepers and bigeye jacks that swirl in the current like living curtains, while the mangrove channels inside the reef flat host juvenile fish in densities that look like an aquarium but are entirely wild.

On land, the hike to the summit of Cerro Coiba (or the shorter walk to the abandoned prison compound that operated on the island from 1919 to 2004 and that gives the island its strangest historical layer) is the main terrestrial activity, and the summit trail passes through primary forest that feels genuinely unexplored — howler monkeys overhead, the forest floor alive with leaf-cutter ants and agoutis, and at the top, a view of the entire island's interior laid out in green contour lines with the Pacific beyond.

The prison history is the island's darkest chapter: Coiba was Panama's Alcatraz, used under military rule to isolate political prisoners, and the ruins of the prison complex — concrete cells, a watchtower, a hospital whose contents were apparently incinerated before the prison closed — stand in the forest near the ranger station as a memorial that Panamanian school groups sometimes visit as part of a national reckoning with the dictatorship period.

What makes Coiba genuinely extraordinary compared to better-known island parks is its scale and its incompleteness: it is enormous (larger than all the Galápagos islands combined), almost entirely undeveloped, and the scientific documentation of its species is still proceeding — new species are still being discovered here, and on a good week of diving a visitor might see something that marine biologists have not yet fully catalogued, which is a rare experience in the 21st century.

Coiba National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005 as a natural site of outstanding universal value, specifically cited for its role as a refuge for species separated from the mainland by sea-level rise.

The island supports at least 30 endemic subspecies found nowhere else on Earth, a level of endemism that places it among the most important island conservation sites in the Americas.

The marine environment is among the richest in the Eastern Pacific, with more than 750 species of fish and 63 coral species recorded, making it one of the premier diving destinations in Central America.