PanamaArea: 75,417 km²Time zone: GMT-5

Panama is generally considered the southernmost country of the North American continent, and is the only country in the world where one can watch the sun rise from the Pacific Ocean and set over the Atlantic.

“We like the rain in Panama,” the tour guide told us as we looked out of the car windows at it pelting down, “Because rain is money.” It rains for nine months a year in Panama, between late April and early December. The raindrops accrue their value when they enter the huge man-made Lake Gatún, which in turn feeds the Panama Canal, the country’s economic central nervous system. Each ship passing through its system of locks requires an average of 200 megalitres of fresh water to sluice through the canal, bringing the boats up over the hump of the Soberanía National Park and into the sea. The rainy season also helps the country keep its coffers filled by maintaining its lush tropical landscapes, which bring in the tourists. While I was in Panama in July, every day brought rolling rainclouds and every night vast electrical storms. In the day, often both the sea and the sky were the same luminescent silver-grey, giving the impression of being inside a huge damp pearl.

Our trip began in Panama City, an architecturally fantastic metropolis where turkey vultures hunch over big green bins and great-tailed grackles screech in the trees along the waterfront. The old town, a cluster of streets in the process of having its colonial facades restored, is encircled by a vast ring road suspended above the sea. Across the bay, huge skyscrapers descend practically to the water’s edge. The Panama Canal, which, because of the rain, we visited in a car tour from the hotel, is a flat vista of cranes and docks, which you can peer at from the traditional Chinese pagoda set on a viewing platform, a monument built to commemorate the contributions of Chinese immigrants to the construction of the Panama Canal, and 150 years of Chinese presence in Panama.

Diablos Rojos are decomissioned school buses that are shipped to Panama from the US, where they’re painted and often decorated with lights, and used as privatised public transport.

In Panama City, turkey vultures hunch over big green bins and great-tailed grackles screech in the trees along the waterfront

It was the French who made the first effort to dig the canal in 1881, an attempt that lasted for eight years. During the process, they lost around 22,000 workers, mostly to malaria and yellow fever, and went bankrupt. The Americans took on the project and completed it in 1914, benefiting from the discovery that malaria and yellow fever were mosquito-borne and therefore more preventable, and also from the sticks of dynamite they brought to turn the mountains into easily transportable rubble. The lobby of the Panama City hotel Sofitel Legend Casco Viejo has black and white photographs of the construction, which saw the shifting on average of 1 million cubic yards of land per month (at the peak of its construction, it was triple that). For the Culebra Cut, the 8.75-mile stretch extending through the Continental Divide from the Chagres River at the north to Pedro Miguel on the south, full-size trains pulled steel aprons that were loaded with earth and hauled away, with 20 of these locomotives doing the work of nearly 6,000 manual labourers. The doors fitted to the locks were so vast that they had to build a special boat to bring them over from Italy.

Now, it costs a large container ship around $300,000 to pass through the Canal, with the journey lasting about ten hours. Records were broken in 2024 by the MSC Marie, a ship about 50 metres longer than the Shard is tall, with the capacity to carry 17,640 containers. You can look her up on VesselFinder: at the time of writing, she’s sailing from Antwerp in Belgium to Gdańsk, Poland, under the Liberian flag. Around 10,000 ships pass through the Canal every year, carrying nearly 450 million tons of goods; more than 40% of goods traded between northeast Asia and the American East Coast go through the Canal.

The view from the plane shows the ringroad that extends into the sea around Panama City’s old town.

But I wasn’t in Panama to get to investigate marine shipping – I was visiting Islas Secas, a cluster of islands to the south of Panama that are only accessible by a vertiginous route on a small seaplane. Islas Secas is an archipelago of 14 islands, of which only one has buildings – a restaurant, a bar, spa, gym (under construction), pool, and eight “casitas”. It’s a breathtaking tropical island, exploding with coconut palms and cedar trees, and surrounded by electric blue water. In his 1979 book, La Isla Mágica, Panamanian author Rogelio Sinán describes island life as “the magical world that surrounds us day and night: breeze, trees, bells; sea, sloops, seagulls; fish, shellfish, waves; clouds, storms, fruits”. In my notes, I seem to have been compelled to make similar lists, mostly of the fish, birds and animals we saw: iguanas, hummingbirds, parrotfish, three-banded butterflyfish, guineafowl pufferfish, and barracuda; Halloween crabs, Mexican goatfish, Moorish idol, black hawks, blue-footed boobies, brown pelicans, and magnificent frigatebirds with forked tails.

These fish, birds and animals are here in healthy numbers because of Islas Secas’ sustained investment in marine conservation. The archipelago is located in the Gulf of Chiriquí Marine Biological Corridor, which connects 11 marine sanctuaries and provides a critical corridor for migratory species. On our second night, we were invited to a conservation report, where a slideshow was presented by the resort’s charismatic resident conservation leader, Beny Wilson – an event I’d thought was organised for the journalists, but was for the island’s guests, a sign of how central the sustainability effort is to everyone. The islands are a marine conservation zone, which has a significant impact on essentially every one of the resort’s processes and activities. Solar panels produce 100% of the power, except for a gas line used to heat water, and for cooking. One hundred percent of food waste is composted, and a 300-metre-long solar array offsets all the carbon required to bring guests to and from the island via seaplane. This commitment to ecology extends to the island’s orientation towards exploration. An activity centre seems to be permanently staffed with agreeable people who will take you hydrofoiling, windsurfing, nature hiking, sailing and kayaking. Importantly, you can also do it yourself: I borrowed a kayak and went over the bay to look at big broken clam shells on the island’s more difficult-to-access beaches, feeling very alone and exhilarated, before paddling back laboriously as another storm rolled in.

Those beaches, too, are absolutely alive with crabs. The Pacific hermit crabs of these islands – of which there must be tens of thousands, if not millions – largely make their homes in the shells of sea snails, which are small, round and brown-grey, just like stones. They give the impression that the beach itself is alive, the stones themselves pelting up to the rocks, clustering around fallen coconuts, and on the corpses of other crabs. Even in the centre of Islas Secas, on the walking trails that criss-cross the island, hermit crabs scuttle across the paths and hide in burrows in the mud. Meanwhile, when you’re making your way back from the restaurant to the casita at night, the forest around you is noisy with the sounds of Halloween crabs – which are neon orange and purple, like a plastic decoration – making their way through the undergrowth and across the sand in search of something to scavenge.

Woven animal masks are sold in tourist shops in Panama City, ostensibly woven by indigenous Panamanians in the mountains.

The crab has evolved at least five different times since the early Jurassic period, giving it the name “carcinisation”. This means that crabs that look biologically related are, in fact, descended from totally distinct evolutionary lines. This is because the crab’s shape – hard carapace, tucked-in tail, pincers – is one of nature’s best defence systems against predators. They can also exist in varied environments: crabs of the same essential configuration can scuttle across a sandy seabed, flail through open water, hide in a mud bank, and climb a tree. Hermits fold away into their shells perfectly, all their articulated parts slotting together. One of the reasons they are so industrious is that they prefer the odours of foods that they have not recently eaten, like people who get bored eating the same thing for every meal, which compels them to forage far and wide. They communicate by making a chirping noise, and can live for over thirty years. The presence of the crabs gives the island a feeling of deep sentience. They feel like little nodes or pixels of conscious life, producing a constant aura of living activity, whether on the yellow-grey sand of the beach or nestled in the roots of the banyan trees.

As we watched, the calf launched almost his whole body out of the water again and again, as Beny shouted delightfully, “He’s happy! He’s a happy baby!”

The crabs – comedic, industrious – are the foil to the island’s real star, the humpback whale. Until around 1985, Japan allegedly used to give Panama significant financial support for continuing to vote in favour of allowing international commercial whaling; reportedly, the president’s daughter persuaded him to change his mind, and now Panama is on the frontline for protecting marine species. It is unique amongst the countries of the world for its legislation recognising the rights of marine animals, which include the granting of legal rights to sea turtles to life, safe passage and a healthy environment. Ships are mandated to pass through the Canal slowly, which is especially important around Christmas, the time of the southern migration of humpbacks, and when Christmas buying sees a spike in commercial shipping activity. The waters surrounding the islands are the only place in the world to host two entirely separate populations of migrating humpback whales, one from the north and one from the south. This means that the smaller northern population visits the islands between December and April, while the southern visitors arrive to breed and raise their calves between July and October. We headed out to find the whales on a boat trip with Beny, and came across a mother and her calf, about three weeks old. As we watched, the calf launched almost his whole body out of the water again and again, as Beny shouted delightfully, “He’s happy! He’s a happy baby!” HappyWhale is also the name of a database that Beny and the island’s guests can upload pictures of the whales, which analyses their flukes and logs them as individuals into its records. The island is continually building a sense of the life which surrounds it, in the understanding that information equals protection.

VesselFinder and HappyWhale have a surprising amount in common. Both are map-based databases which religiously track the movement and profiles of individual ships and whales, respectively. Both have diligent and devout user communities and a surprising amount of lore. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing ships and whales share. A recent study showed that global shipping routes overlap with 92% of migration paths for whales.

On the last day on the island, I was standing in the sea up to my waist, looking out and thinking about what it would be like to sit on a bus in London. I happened to look down at the moment a stingray glided silently past my feet. There are two possible silent threats on the horizon for Panama: weather and Trump.

Islas Secas doesn’t intend to be only a tropical paradise, but an institution that is deeply, heartfeltly, Panamanian. It even likes to gently insist that international guests spend the night in Panama City before they get to the island so that they have a sense of where they’ve landed. Islas Secas is hostile to the idea that it could be a magical string of islands from anywhere: it is Panamanian, and the life that surrounds it is Panamanian, too. But the weather is a global system. A warming climate threatens the functioning of the Canal, which depends on the vast quantities of water sluicing through it every day. A severe drought in late 2023 meant that only 22 ships could pass through the canal every day, instead of 36; transits fell by nearly a third.

Also, the extent to which the Panama Canal has always been a colonial venture is sensitive. The Panamanians I spoke to seemed to love the Americans – our Panama City guide proudly tells us in the car that “you can drive from Panama City to Canada, but you can’t to Colombia”. In the middle of a roundabout we pass a statue depicting Jimmy Carter and Panamanian head of state Omar Torrijos shaking hands, an immortalisation of the moment in 1977 when the Americans handed the Panama Canal over to Panamanian control. But Panama has had a more complex relationship with the Americans; in his 1990 essay “Panama: A Palindrome” on George Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989, Eliot Weinberger writes that, “A thousand years from now, while the rest of the earth is wearing white robes and discussing philosophy with Alpha Centauri, the President of the United States – there will always be a President and a United States – will no doubt yet again unwrap Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick and clobber that little strip of jungle cleared for oil tankers and secretive banks.”

Staff members are on hand to take visitors fishing from the resort’s fleet of boats. Here, a barracuda is hauled in.

The rooms consist of individual “casitas” with wrap-around slatted walls that can be open or closed. The design is based on the cabins built during the construction of the Panama Canal, designed for maximum air circulation in this humid environment.

By linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Canal drastically shortened trade and naval routes, allowing US corporations to expand markets and send out warships to project military power. American banks, shipping companies and exporters had a direct stake in cheaper, faster access to Asian and Latin American markets. Now, the Americans threaten to take back what some believe is rightfully theirs. During his inaugural address in January this year, Trump described the arrangement between Carter and Torrijos as a “foolish gift that should never have been made”, complaining that the Canal was de facto now run by China, that the US was being stiffed on the fees, and that he planned to take it back. As of August, Trump’s tariffs had yet to impact the number of ships making the journey from China to the US, but it remains to be seen how our increasingly multipolar world impacts trade and shipping routes.

The islands feel a long way away from the Panama Canal – here, it’s impossible to imagine any decrease in the lushness and wateriness of the environment, its weather systems and cycles. Panama’s otherworldly vitality and beauty derive from its being at the nexus of many migrations and crossings, whether it’s the international shipping that sustains the economy or the whales that gather in the warm water of the bay to have their babies. Those criss-crossing routes are what lend the islands their extravagant diversity. In the final lines of Sinan’s La Isla Mágica, a character muses to himself, “The sea is like time […] Its eternal recurrence perhaps harbours a symbol of eternal becoming.” The Islas too, instead of being a luxury resort plonked onto a tropical paradise, is really more the site of an ongoing process of continual learning, a constant extension of curiosity into the life that surrounds it. Yet though the policies and protections given to ecology and the effect of sustainable practices are real, it is, undeniably, magic, with its purple-orange crabs and vast limpid horizons. In the words of the novel: “The island, marvellous as it is, almost seems unreal.” .

The Twin Otter that brings guests to the island has two engines, allowing for smoothness during the one-hour flight.