Sustainable Travel · Panama

Panama: A Conservation Traveller’s Guide to Whales, Reefs and Cloud Forest

Panama protects more than half of its ocean on paper. On the water, the story is more complicated. A guide to the isthmus for travellers who would rather know than be sold to.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Sustainable Travel

Every August, something improbable happens off Panama’s Pacific coast. Humpback whales that spent the southern summer feeding off Antarctica and Chile arrive to breed and raise calves. They do it in the approach to the Panama Canal, which is to say in one of the busiest stretches of water on the planet. Mothers with newborns and Neopanamax container ships share an address for a few months a year.

It went as badly as you would expect. Between 2009 and 2011 there were thirteen reported fatal collisions between vessels and whales in the Gulf of Panama. Panamanian scientists, a canal pilot and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute took the problem to the International Maritime Organization, which in 2014 adopted traffic separation schemes for the gulf plus a seasonal ten knot speed limit from August to November. Modelling suggested the risk of collision could fall by more than ninety percent.

Then came the part that a brochure would leave out. When Hector Guzman and colleagues checked compliance, they found that ships took the new lanes readily, around 86 percent in 2015 and 90 percent in 2016. Speed was another matter. Only 19 percent of ships slowed to ten knots in 2015, and just 9.7 percent in 2016. The map worked. The speedometer did not.

That gap, between what Panama has written down and what happens on the water, is the single most useful thing a visitor can carry into the country. It is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason to pay attention to where your money lands.

A country invented as a shortcut

People have been crossing this isthmus for thousands of years. The Spanish formalised it: silver came up from Peru, crossed the mountains on the Camino Real by mule, and was loaded onto galleons at Portobelo. The fortifications at Portobelo and San Lorenzo went onto the World Heritage List in 1980 and onto the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012, where the Committee kept them at its 2024 session. Go anyway. Just go knowing that the stonework is losing a slow argument with the sea and with unplanned building.

Panama separated from Colombia in 1903, the canal opened in 1914, the Torrijos and Carter treaties were signed in 1977, and Panama took full control of the waterway on the last day of 1999. That century of American presence is not abstract here. It shaped the Canal Zone forests, the birding trails, the towns, and a great deal of the politics.

Coiba, the island that now anchors Panama’s Pacific conservation story, spent most of the twentieth century as a penal colony. Isolation is an unsentimental form of protection, and it worked. The forests, beaches and reefs came through the era largely intact.

Who lives here

Panama has a system of Indigenous comarcas sitting alongside its provinces, and the comarcas are not scenery. Guna Yala runs for roughly two hundred kilometres along the Caribbean coast and is governed by the Guna through the Congreso General Guna under laws won in the 1925 revolution, whose centenary the comarca marked in 2025. Guna society is matrilineal. The mola, the layered textile panel worn by Guna women, is a living garment, not a souvenir category.

It is also the place where Panama’s climate future arrived first. In 2024 the government relocated the community of Gardi Sugdub, an island about the size of five football pitches, to a new mainland settlement called Isberyala. Around a hundred residents stayed. Panama’s environment ministry has identified 63 other communities at risk from rising seas.

West of there, the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca stretches into the Caribbean lowlands and up into the highlands, and Ngäbe communities run some of the most effective sea turtle monitoring in the region. On the Caribbean coast around Portobelo and Colón, Afro-Antillean and Congo culture is the dominant register. The Congo tradition, descended from communities of people who escaped slavery, was inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list in 2018. Its season runs from San Sebastián’s day on 20 January to Ash Wednesday.

What to eat, and what to ask first

Panamanian cooking is quieter than its neighbours and better than its reputation. Sancocho de gallina, the hen and root vegetable stew built on culantro and ñame, is the national dish and the national hangover cure. Carimañolas are yuca fritters stuffed with meat. Patacones come with almost everything. On the Caribbean side the register shifts entirely: rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, and rondón, a slow seafood and root stew that is Bocas del Toro’s answer to sancocho. Panama City adds Chinese chifa and Lebanese layers on top.

Seafood is where a conservation publication has to be careful. Ceviche de corvina at the Mercado de Mariscos is genuinely one of the great cheap pleasures of the Americas. It is also true that Panama’s fisheries data is thin. A 2025 review of the country’s sharks and rays found that industrial shark production averaged around 3,514 tonnes a year between 1999 and 2013, that official catch records appear significantly underestimated, and that species-level data is largely absent. Work by MarAlliance on the Azuero Peninsula notes that some of the most commercially important species landed there are snappers and groupers, slow growing and long lived, which is exactly the profile that does badly under pressure.

Practically: eat the ceviche, ask what species it is, skip shark and the largest groupers, and treat any menu that says “sustainably caught” without naming a species or a gear type as marketing.

Underwater

Coiba National Park sits in the Gulf of Chiriquí and holds Bahía Damas, among the largest coral reef systems in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Access is from Santa Catalina, with a park entry fee paid in cash at the ranger station. Whale sharks turn up with the cooler upwellings from roughly December to April. Hammerheads are a spring and early summer prospect around the Contreras Islands. Humpbacks are overhead from July to October.

Panama’s protection numbers are real and genuinely impressive. The Cordillera de Coiba expansion in 2021 pushed the country past 30 percent marine protection nine years early, and the 2023 Banco Volcán expansion took it above 54 percent of its exclusive economic zone, the first country in Latin America past half.

Enforcement is the harder question. In January 2025 Panama announced it had caught sixteen vessels fishing illegally inside Cordillera de Coiba, calling it the largest such operation in its history. Eighteen months later, Mongabay reported that little had been made public about the outcome, that a Panamanian nonprofit argued the government had not enforced the rules strictly or handled the cases transparently, and that the agencies involved rejected those criticisms. Both things are true at once: Panama is doing more than most of its neighbours, and the follow-through is unfinished.

On the Caribbean side, the Sea Turtle Conservancy has worked with communities in Bocas del Toro and the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca since 2003. Chiriquí Beach is one of the most important leatherback nesting beaches in the Caribbean. A 2025 analysis of twenty years of nest counts found leatherback nesting stable at Chiriquí but declining at roughly 8.8 percent a year at Bluff and 8.3 percent at Playa Larga. Bluff is the beach nearest Bocas town, and the paper names tourism impacts, dog predation and sand extraction among the local pressures. Proximity to visitors is not a neutral variable.

Which brings us to the one activity worth naming and refusing. Dolphin Bay in Bocas del Toro supports the largest dolphin watching operation in Panama, aimed at a small, genetically distinct resident population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Published work found that in the presence of tour boats the dolphins were less likely to keep socialising and more likely to start travelling, and less likely to start foraging. Separate research found low operator compliance with Panama’s own whale watching guidelines. Skip it. Snorkel a reef instead.

Above the waterline

In the Chiriquí highlands, Sendero Los Quetzales runs between Boquete and Cerro Punta through cloud forest on the flanks of Volcán Barú. It is muddy, rooty and genuinely one of the better places in Panama to see a resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno). Buy the national park entry online through the environment ministry before you go and screenshot the confirmation, because there is no signal on the trail.

Closer to the capital, Pipeline Road in Soberanía National Park is one of the most famous birding corridors anywhere. An Audubon count there in 1985 recorded 385 species in twenty-four hours. The Panama Rainforest Discovery Center on the same road is run by the Fundación Avifauna Eugene Eisenmann, staffs itself largely from neighbouring communities, and puts a 32 metre tower above the canopy. Panama has recorded more than a thousand bird species in a territory smaller than South Carolina.

That forest is also infrastructure. The canal runs on rainwater, and Gatún Lake supplies drinking water to more than two million people, about half the country. In 2023, one of the driest years since the 1950s, transits fell from around 36 a day to 24. Rain and a shift to La Niña restored near-normal operations through 2025, and the canal authority has approved a new reservoir in the Río Indio watershed, budgeted at 1.2 billion dollars with a further 400 million for affected communities. Construction is slated to begin in 2027. Communities inside that watershed are not uniformly in favour, and it is worth understanding that before you admire the locks.

Who is actually doing the work

If you want your trip to leave something behind beyond a hotel bill, these are organisations with a documented record on the ground: the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which supplied the science behind most of Panama’s marine protected areas; Fundación MarViva, working on marine spatial planning and responsible fishing and tourism across the Eastern Tropical Pacific; Panacetacea, whose humpback photo identification surveys in the Gulf of Chiriquí date to 2002 and which trains boat captains in responsible whale watching; the Sea Turtle Conservancy, working with Ngäbe communities on the Caribbean nesting beaches; and the Fundación Avifauna Eugene Eisenmann on Pipeline Road.

Panama’s environmental politics are unusually live right now. The Cobre Panamá copper mine has been shut since November 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled its operating contract unconstitutional after some of the largest protests in the country’s modern history. Stockpile processing restarted in 2026 and the government has said it expects to decide on the mine’s future before the end of the year. Whatever you think about copper, it is a reminder that Panamanians have shown they will contest what happens to their country. Visitors are guests in that argument, not referees.

Further reading: the International Whaling Commission’s Whale Watching Handbook country profile for Panama, and World Weather Attribution’s analysis of the 2023 canal water crisis.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean