Coiba spent 85 years as the address Panamanians feared most — a penal colony whose guards rarely chased an escapee, because the jungle, the crocodiles and the open Pacific did the job for them. It ran from 1919 to 2004, held some 3,000 inmates in open camps, and under the Torrijos and Noriega dictatorships it swallowed political prisoners who never came home. The terror worked like a fence: while the rest of Central America's Pacific coast was logged and built on, nobody came near Coiba, and three-quarters of the region's largest island stayed forested. Cut off by rising seas some 12,000 years ago, it was never reached by jaguar, puma or ocelot, and the animals that did arrive drifted into forms found nowhere else: the Coiba howler monkey, the Coiba agouti, the Coiba spinetail. Scarlet macaws, gone from most of their old range, still cross the bays here. UNESCO listed the park in 2005.
Most people come for the water. Sheltered from the cold upwelling that batters the coast, Coiba's corals ride out the El Niño events that bleach the eastern Pacific, and 760 fish species and 33 kinds of shark move through the park. Off Granito de Oro, a speck of sand ringed by coral, whitetip sharks lie under the ledges while jacks and snapper stack up in the blue above you. Humpbacks arrive from both ends of the planet — southern whales up from Antarctic feeding grounds between July and October, a smaller northern group from January to March — and calve in the warm bays. There is no hotel and no road: a few ranger cabins, and every visit made by boat and permit out of Santa Catalina. Panama tripled the protected sea offshore in 2021, and the prison chapter is not quite closed: in June 2026, 29 high-risk gang leaders were moved into a detention centre at the island's naval station.