Panama's Caribbean island archipelago — Red Frog Beach, pink dolphins, chocolate-farm homestays, and the most laid-back beach town in Central America
Bocas del Toro (the 'mouths of the bull' in Spanish — the Bocas province and its eponymous archipelago of 9 main islands and 200 smaller islets in the Almirante Bay of the Caribbean coast, at the Costa Rican border of northwestern Panama) is the Caribbean-facing counterpart to Pacific-coast Panama: warm, humid, and unhurried in a way that the Pacific coast's surf towns (Venao, Santa Catalina) never quite achieve. Bocas Town (the main settlement, on Isla Colón, the largest island) is a grid of painted wooden houses on stilts over the water, Caribbean-heritage Afro-Panamanian culture, backpacke…
The Bocas del Toro archipelago was inhabited by the Ngäbe-Buglé and Bribri indigenous peoples before the Spanish colonial period. Christopher Columbus's fourth voyage (1502) visited the Bay of Almirante — the modern Bocas del Toro area — and is commemorated by the name of the regional bay. The United Fruit Company (the US corporation that dominated Central American banana production from the 1890s-1950s and whose economic and political influence gave Central America the term 'banana republic') operated its first Panamanian banana plantation from the Bocas del Toro coast, bringing Caribbean wo…