Volcán Barú

The drive from Boquete up to the Volcán Barú summit road is one of the most dramatic in Central America: the paved road climbs through coffee farms at 1,200 metres, then avocado and citrus groves, then a strange upper world of elfin forest — stunted, wind-pruned trees encrusted with moss and epiphytes — that feels more Andean than Caribbean.

The summit itself, on a clear day, offers one of the world's most improbable geographical party tricks: standing on the peak of Panama's highest point and looking west you see the Pacific Ocean, looking east you see the Caribbean Sea, and on the very clearest mornings around dawn you can see both at once, a spectacle that is mentioned in every guidebook and that, according to local guides, occurs on perhaps fifteen to twenty days per year.

The cloud forest that clothes the volcano's slopes is the primary reason to visit beyond the summit view: the forest is genuinely misty rather than merely rainy, with clouds moving through the canopy at eye level on most mornings, and the birdlife — especially the resplendent quetzal, Panama's national bird, with its absurdly long green tail feathers — is sufficiently abundant that serious birders travel from Europe and North America specifically to spot it here.

Coffee farming is the economic and cultural foundation of the Boquete valley, and a visit to one of the specialty coffee farms — such as Café Kotowa or Finca La Soledad — that export directly to specialty roasters abroad is one of the more engaging agricultural tourism experiences in Central America: you see the picking, the wet milling, the fermentation tanks and the drying beds, and you taste the result in a cup that costs a fraction of what it does in London or Toronto.

The town of Boquete itself, at 1,200 metres above sea level, has a permanent spring-like climate that Panamanians have been retiring to for decades and that North American retirees discovered more recently, resulting in a small but significant expat community that has changed the town's character without entirely erasing it — the Saturday market still sells only local produce, the church still rings at noon, and the main street still closes for the annual flower festival in March.

Hiking routes on Volcán Barú range from the straightforward summit trail (a 4WD vehicle is needed for the final section of road; the trail itself is a 6-kilometre round trip on a clear path) to the Sendero Los Quetzales, a 12-kilometre trail that traverses the cloud forest from the Boquete side to the town of Volcán on the Pacific slope, named for the quetzals that are most reliably seen in the early morning hours before the trail gets busy.

What makes the Volcán Barú experience different from other highland destinations in the region is the combination of the extreme altitude relative to the latitude — at 8 degrees north the peak is only 700 metres above the Equator — and the fact that the entire Chiriquí highlands sits on the edge of the Caribbean volcanic arc, giving the landscape a geological intensity that makes even the clouds seem to move faster and the colours seem to come from a different colour wheel than lowland Panama.

Volcán Barú is the only point in Panama from which both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea can be seen simultaneously, on clear mornings; this is a genuinely unique geographical feature that no other place in the world offers.

The Chiriquí highlands cloud forest is one of the most accessible and species-rich montane forests in Central America, with the resplendent quetzal being the flagship species.

Boquete's specialty coffee farms offer an agricultural tourism experience comparable to the best in Colombia or Ethiopia, at a fraction of the travel cost.