The San Blas Islands are some 365 coral islets on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and none of that sand is for sale. The Guna rose against the police posted on their islands in 1925. Under Guna law no land may be sold to an outsider, so every hut on every cay belongs to a Guna family, and who comes ashore is decided by the Guna General Congress. The flag they raised carries a hooked cross that has nothing to do with Europe: for the Guna it is the octopus whose arms made the world. About fifty of the islands carry villages, packed with thatched huts to the water's edge. The rest are a rim of sand and a few palms, walked round in a couple of minutes.
Open launches run between the cays all day and the going is most of the pleasure: the shallows change colour under the hull, a different scrap of land for lunch. Off Isla Perro Chico a cargo ship went down in 1958 and lies shallow enough to snorkel, its hull furred with brain and fire coral and its plates worked over by parrotfish. Nights are spent in a Guna-owned palm hut with a sand floor, cane walls and no electricity. Nothing leaves these islands unless somebody carries it off, your rubbish included. In the villages women lay out molas, the layered panels that are the art here. Up to seven thicknesses of dyed cotton are stacked and sliced through, and the design appears out of what has been cut away. You buy one from the woman who cut it, and the back of the cloth tells you whether it is real. Leatherbacks nest at Armila, on the comarca's mainland shore, from April to June. The Guna call the turtle yaug and count it kin: in their telling it lived as a person until a great wave swept it into the sea. The sea is now changing the arithmetic. In June 2024 some three hundred families left Gardi Sugdub, an island barely a metre above the water, for a new town built for them on the mainland.