Panama
Lago Gatún
Freighters thread islands of howler monkeys across what was once the world's largest man-made lake.
The water sits warm and brown-green, and the sound carrying across it is not birdsong but the low thrum of a container ship sliding between forested islands. Every island here was a hilltop a century ago, before the valley was told to become a lake.
When the Gatún Dam closed across the Chagres River in 1913, the flooding valley became the largest artificial lake the world had seen, a title it held for decades, drowning around 164 square miles of rainforest and leaving the hilltops as islands. Howler monkeys and sloths live in those island canopies today, with more than 400 bird species around the shores, while every ship transiting the Panama Canal crosses the lake between them. Peacock bass introduced in the 1950s thrived so completely that Gatún now ranks among the world's premier freshwater sport fisheries, with anglers casting while loaded freighters pass. At the lake's Atlantic end, the Agua Clara visitor centre stacks the spectacle: the expanded locks below, ships queued across the water, and the forest carrying on regardless.
Family
Children get ships the size of buildings, monkey islands and lock machinery in one boat-and-viewing-deck day, a living engineering lesson.
Couple
Take an early boat while the lake is still glassy, then watch a freighter's silhouette cross the water at dusk: surreal and quietly romantic.
Friends
Charter a fishing boat and chase peacock bass between the islands; the fishery's reputation does not oversell it.
- Closing the Gatún Dam in 1913 flooded the Chagres valley into the largest artificial lake the world had seen, a record held for decades.
- Drowned hilltops became forested islands where howler monkeys and sloths live above the shipping lanes.
- Peacock bass introduced in the 1950s made this one of the world's premier freshwater sport fisheries.
- The Agua Clara visitor centre overlooks the expanded locks, with ships crossing the lake in view every day.
Boats turn back to Gamboa's marina, where El Corotú's ceviche is the standing reward.
The Plátano Corvina follows, corvina on plantain, the plate that finishes a morning among the islands.
Udo
South Korea
Black lava meets white coral sand on an island that grows its own dessert.
Durdle Door
England
A limestone arch punched through the cliff by the sea, framing nothing but blue horizon.
Crescent Island
Kenya
No fences, no vehicles — walk among giraffes and hippos on a volcanic lake island.
Stockholm Archipelago
Sweden
Thirty thousand islands dissolving into the Baltic, each with its own jetty and swimming rock.
Gamboa
Panama
A rainforest town where ocean-going ships glide silently between the trees.
Casco Viejo
Panama
Crumbling colonial balconies where jazz drifts over a skyline of glass towers.
El Valle de Antón
Panama
A whole town spreads across the floor of an extinct volcano's crater.
Punta Patiño
Panama
Harpy eagles with the largest talons of any living eagle nest in this Darién reserve.