The San Blas Islands are roughly 365 coral islets scattered along 370 kilometres of Panama's Caribbean coast, and only about fifty of them carry villages. The rest are a fistful of white sand, a few coconut palms and a ring of water so shallow and clear that anchored boats look like they are hanging in mid-air. You sleep in a palm-thatched hut with no electricity, snorkel reef edges where brain corals and bright fish sit a metre beneath you, and wade out to sandbanks in open sea. What you will not find is a resort. The islands are the autonomous homeland of the Guna, who won them from Panama after rising against the police posted here in 1925. Guna law forbids selling land to outsiders, so every hut belongs to a Guna family, and the Guna General Congress decides who may visit.
The rising had a name and an outcome. It declared a short-lived Republic of Tule, and after mediation by the United States, Panama recognised the homeland in 1938 as the country's first indigenous comarca. That agreement, not any ministry in Panama City, is why the coast still looks the way it does. The comarca is not only islands. On its mainland shore at Armila, leatherback turtles haul out from April to June in one of the largest nesting gatherings anywhere on Earth. The harder problem is the sea itself. In June 2024 about three hundred families left Gardi Sugdub, an island barely a metre above the water, for a mainland town built for them, in Panama's first planned climate relocation. Other islands are expected to follow. Stand on one of the smaller cays and the arithmetic is in front of you: the tallest thing on it is a coconut palm, and the water runs flat to the horizon on every side.