Marie Poppins July 11, 2021

Adventure travel in San Blas, day tours and 2021 offers! In this place the first Spanish settlement in the area was built in the early seventeenth century and was also where San Blas was founded. On the San Basilio Hill the most important Colonial Ruins on the Pacific Coast are found. The old fort of San Blas also known as La Contaduria (now semi-restored) and the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary «La Marinera» dating from 1769, where you can find the famous bronze bells immortalized by Henry W. Longfellow in his posthumous poem «The Bells of San Blas.» These Colonial ruins are not restored but well worth visiting… The church is beautiful and gives us a clear idea of the Spanish community that settled in San Blas in those days.

To get to San Blas you’ve got four options. You can fly from Panama straight into the San Blas Islands, take a sailing boat from Cartagena, take a speedboat from Capurganá, or take the bus from Panama City. Most backpackers travelling between Colombia and Panama choose one of these options. For a good reason: Travelling over the land border, known as the ‘Darien Gap’, can be very dangerous . This is a popular drug trafficking route out of Colombia to Panama and is not safe (plus it’s just untamed jungle the whole way!).

Arriving at your first destination you will be greeted by a tropical palm-fringed island paradise and calm waters with various shades of blue and green inviting you to dive in and play with the multitude of colorful fish surrounding you, while snorkeling on the sunken shipwreck reef located close to the beach. You will have plenty of time to relax in the shade of a palm tree, to explore the island, to meet the amazing Kuna population or to bath in the crystal clear ocean, surrounding yourself with the iridescent turquoise water colors allowing for postcard perfect photo shots. We provide all of our guests with free snorkel equipment to marvel at the colorful reef and the multitude of fish species surrounding the wreck. On our second stop, a typical San Blas paradise island, you will be served a tasty and freshly prepared lunch, with a choice of fresh fish, mixed seafood or chicken (note: we also offer alternatives, if you have diet restrictions). Spend time exploring this beautiful island, meet the friendly Kuna family that inhabits it and learn about their culture, or just relax in the shade of a palm tree. Discover additional details on https://www.taotravel365.com/san-blas-sailing-adventures.

One of the very few places in Panama where you can watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, the Sunset Coast is an undiscovered area with small towns, wide open beaches, and a small number of lodges where you can get away from the tourist scene. This is rural Panama, home to rolling hills, small villages, family farms, and huge beaches lined by palms and forest. Foreign tourists are not plentiful the way they are in other areas of the country, and many of the visitors are Panamanian. The road down to the Sunset Coast from the Pan-American Highway is twisty and has a few potholes to dodge, but every mile takes you further off the beaten track. This area is also popular with surfers. The wide-open beaches take the brunt of the Pacific Ocean rollers, and it’s rare that you’ll need to share a wave. If you want a beach all to yourself, this is the place to come.

Few locations include Old Customs, It is a colonial-style building, built in order to serve as traffic control office Port San Blas. Today is the Casa de la Cultura in which a museum which houses some prehispanic pieces found in some localities home, you can also see traces of its construction based on thick and solid walls and its ancient arches gateway.

San Blas adventure travel destinations are a fabulous thing right now. Can you take your luggage to San Blas? Nope! You need to leave your luggage behind in Panama City an pack a day-bag for San Blas. If you are in these small planes, you cannot take a big bag, you can’t fit it into these packed tourist Jeeps, and you can’t take it on the small boats out to the islands. Both our original “hotel” (really just a bed over the sand) and our sailing company told us no luggage. You could get by with a backpack 48L or less I suppose. Definitely no rolling luggage! We left ours at our hotel in Panama City when we checked out. They are used to this.

But are these islands actually worth going to in the first place? Well, picture this: the place you’ll stay on will genuinely look like a Robinson Crusoe hideaway. The sand will be white and fine, the sea will be bathwater warm, coconut palms will provide welcome shade, the snorkelling will be excellent, and there probably won’t be more than fifteen of you there. The Kuna will feed you and take you to other islands, but otherwise they will just let you be. It is, genuinely, a little piece of paradise. Discover extra details on taotravel365.com.