Eastern Panama Places

The Darién

The easternmost province of the Darién is Panama's wildest, least accessible region, home to extraordinary flora, fauna, and indigenous communities. Its remote eastern and southern extremes are dominated by mountain ranges cloaked with dense jungle, whereas its lowlands are drained by serpentine rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean at the Golfo de San Miguel. Much of its wilderness is sequestered within Parque Nacional Darién and several nearby protected areas. Those preserves hold imposing, primeval forests dominated by massive tropical trees such as mahogany, strangler fig, and barrel-trunked cuipos. They are home to an array of wildlife that includes more than 450 bird species and everything from boa constrictors to strange and wonderful butterflies. While most of that wilderness is inaccessible, there are a half dozen spots that provide easy access to the region's wonders, the best of which are the field stations in Parque Nacional Darién and the Reserva Natural Punta Patiño.

The Darién is a lush and rainy region with muddy rivers lined with the tangled roots of mangroves and thick swaths of elephant grass. Flocks of macaws often pass noisily overhead, and the most popular form of transportation is the dugout canoe. The province's main rivers are dotted with dozens of indigenous Emberá and Wounaan villages that probably look much as the region's towns did when Balboa hiked across the isthmus five centuries ago. Villages such as Mogue and La Marea are set up to receive visitors: a day or two spent in these communities can be an unforgettable experience. The Darién has Panama's best bird-watching and sport fishing, but it is also a good destination for anyone interested in tropical nature and traditional cultures or travelers who simply want to stray from the beaten path.

The Darién Gap

The impenetrable jungle that covers the eastern and southern Darién occupies the only interruption in the Pan-American Highway, which would otherwise run continuously from Alaska to southern Chile. The United States began promoting and underwriting that regional road system in the 1940s, but they asked Panama to leave a so-called "Darién Gap" intact to help prevent foot-and-mouth disease from spreading north from South America. An outbreak of the disease did occur in Colombia in 2009, but there's a more compelling reason to maintain the gap today. Panama is likely in no hurry to complete a road into a neighboring country with numerous armed groups and drug traffickers. This is good news for conservationists, who lament that the highway is flanked by deforested landscapes in the rest of the country. The highway, which is called the Carretera Interamericana (Inter-American Highway) in Panama, becomes a muddy track in the Darién, dead-ending about 50 km (31 mi) short of the Colombian border, at the town of Yaviza. To the east and south of that frontier town are dozens of indigenous villages and the biggest remaining expanse of tropical wilderness in Central America, which will hopefully remain intact for generations to come.