When Christopher Columbus first set eyes on Bocas del Toro on Oct. 6, 1502, he was struck by the area’s natural beauty. The archipelago, located on present-day Panama’s northwestern Caribbean coast, was a remote and untamed frontier whose swampy terrain, relentless tropical diseases, and absence of major gold deposits had—until then—kept colonial powers at bay. In the centuries that followed, the region became a haven for pirates, foreign settlers, wealthy landowners, and their enslaved