Omar Torrijos National Park

The forest above El Copé is so wet that moss grows on moss, and for stretches of the year the ridges stay wrapped in fog. This is the cloud forest that took Omar Torrijos, and the park that keeps his name.

Torrijos signed the 1977 treaties with Jimmy Carter that returned the canal to Panamanian sovereignty, and in 1981 his plane crashed in these mountains; the park protecting them was named in his honour. Its 25,000 hectares climb from primary forest into misty highlands where five wild cat species survive, jaguar, puma, ocelot, jaguarundi and margay, alongside birds like the bare-necked umbrellabird and red-headed barbet. One trail rises to a summit where, when the weather opens, both the Caribbean and the Pacific show on their opposite horizons; another drops down the Caribbean slope of the Continental Divide through forest thick enough to demand a guide. The fog is not an interruption here but the climate itself.