Punta Caracol, Bocas del Toro · Panama · North America
Bocas del Toro: Panama's Caribbean islands
Cabins on stilts, boats instead of cars – and a Lithuanian footnote nobody expects.
Tested by Paulius Pikelis · 140 countries
WOW · INSPIRE · BRAND
Bocas del Toro: Panama's Caribbean islands
Bocas del Toro is the part of Panama that finally looks like the brochure. After the heat and grey of the Pacific side, you cross to a Caribbean archipelago of low, jungle-green islands, soft-sand beaches, and water in three shades of turquoise. It is reached by a short boat hop from Almirante, and it runs at a deliberately horizontal pace: the local motto might as well be that life is lazier than it looks.
We based ourselves on the water, in a cabin on stilts off Punta Caracol, the kind of place where you step off your deck straight into the sea. Days are spent island-hopping by boat: the Zapatillas cays with their postcard sandbars, Starfish Beach, Red Frog, snorkelling stops in the warm shallows between them, all of it cheap by Caribbean standards. The nights are warm and sticky enough to remind you that you are deep in the tropics.
The strangest detail is the one I did not see coming. Scattered through the islands are spots with Lithuanian names: a Palanga here, a Baltija there, a beach bar called Bibi's. Some Baltic thread runs through this corner of Panama, and stumbling on your own country's seaside town names on a Caribbean island is the kind of surreal footnote that makes a place stick in memory.
Bocas is where Panama earns back some of the goodwill it loses elsewhere. Come for the islands, stay out on the water if the budget allows, and give it three slow days rather than one rushed one.
