Sights

The best, and most popular, stretch of beach on the island is in front of the Hotel Isla Grande [1]. A better and less crowded beach is on Isla Mamey, a tiny, uninhabited private island with relatively calm, shallow waters. It’s possible to snorkel or scuba dive here. This is a popular destination for boat tours. These tours usually include a trip near the mainland through a channel lined with beautiful mangroves. This channel has come to be known locally as the “Tunnel of Love.”

West of Isla Cabra is Bahía Linton, one of the safest anchorages between Colón [2] and Cartagena, Colombia. (There’s another anchorage at José del Mar, better known as José Pobre. It’s in a cove next to the isolated village of Cacique, between Portobelo [3] and Isla Grande [4].)

On the boat ride over from the mainland to Isla Grande there’s a developed island that’s largely deforested except for palm trees. This is Isla Cabra, a private island. It is not open to visitors, but those with binoculars should keep their eyes open for macaw nests.

At the entrance to Bahía Linton is Isla Linton, another private island one should not set foot on. However, boat tours of the waters near Isla Linton are popular because of the monkeys that have been introduced here, which boatmen summon by clapping. Be careful: Tourists often feed the monkeys (something you should not do), which has made them bold around people. A monkey bit a woman in 2002.

The owners of Isla Linton, Allan and Rosalind Baitel, are conservationists working in conjunction with Florida State University to create a research facility on the island.

The Baitels also run an animal rescue and rehabilitation program behind their home on the mainland (again, this is not open to the public). Here they try to heal animals wounded by hunters or otherwise injured or interfered with, after which they return them to the forest. In some cases, all they can do is give animals a safe home, as is the case with a couple of jaguars that some people kept as “pets” before the couple rescued them. These jaguars would no longer be able to survive in the wild.

Unfortunately, Panama [5] has no program for breeding jaguars in captivity, so the Baitels have been trying to find a way to export the jaguars to a country that does have such a program. Ironically, the international CITES treaty, created to protect endangered species, prohibits the export of animals that were not actually bred in captivity, which has proved to be a major obstacle.