Isla Bastimentos

You step off the water taxi and a strawberry poison dart frog, scarlet with ink-black spots, sits on a leaf at ankle height, entirely unconcerned. Bastimentos has no cars and no roads across it; the jungle starts behind the beach and runs inland unbroken.

The strawberry poison dart frog exists in over a hundred colour forms across its range, and nowhere holds more of that diversity than Bocas del Toro; on Bastimentos alone the frogs shift from bright red with defined spots behind Red Frog Beach to white-bellied and cream-gold forms toward the island's western tip. The island also anchors Panama's first marine protected area, the Bastimentos Island National Marine Park, established in 1988 across reef, mangrove and forest. On the north shore, the 5.6-kilometre sweep of Playa Larga hosts nesting leatherback, hawksbill, green and loggerhead turtles between April and October, monitored by the Sea Turtle Conservancy since 2003. Human life clusters at the edges: Old Bank, an Afro-Caribbean town of stilt houses descended from banana-boom workers, and the Ngäbe communities of Bahía Honda and Salt Creek, all connected by boat and footpath.