Coiba is the largest island in Central America, off Panama's Pacific coast, and for eighty-five years it was a penal colony that nobody went near. That is why three-quarters of it still stands under uncut forest and the reefs around it are among the richest in the eastern Pacific. The colony never needed a fence. Inmates lived in open camps across the island, and the sea was left to do the work of the walls. The camps are still there. You walk into roofless blocks in the clearings, concrete cracked open by roots and rebar going to rust, and nothing is curated or explained. The boats run mile after mile past forest that falls into the sea without a road, a roof or a light on it. There is no coastal path and nowhere to land, so a boat is the only way you see it.
Granito de Oro is a speck of sand a hundred paces across, ringed by reef. You slide in off the beach straight over coral, among parrotfish and turtles, with young whitetip sharks on the sand below. The dive everyone comes for is Bahía Damas, where the current piles snapper and jack into slow-turning walls and whitetips rest in the sand channels below. At 135 hectares it is among the largest reefs in this ocean. Humpbacks calve in the warm bays, and your boat cuts its engine and drifts, because chasing a whale under power only pushes it away. The strangest thing here, though, is on Jicarón, an islet inside the park. Its white-faced capuchins crack open hermit crabs, snails and coconuts with stone hammers, the only capuchins known to do it as a habit. Researchers tie it to an island with no mammal predators: the monkeys spend their days on the ground, unhurried, with time to experiment. What else they invented is harder to explain. Over fourteen months camera traps caught young males carrying off at least eleven infant howler monkeys — not eating them, not gaining anything — one juvenile starting it and four others copying him, like a fashion.