The San Blas Islands sit off Panama’s Caribbean coast, between the canal and the Colombian border: 365 coral islands (one for each day of the year, according to the Kuna tradition that governs them) and a population of the Guna Yala people who have maintained both their land rights and their cultural independence in a way that almost no other indigenous group in the Caribbean has managed.
A San Blas charter is unlike anything else in Central American waters. The Guna do not permit large resort development; there is no electricity on most islands beyond solar panels and small generators; the molas (reverse-appliqué textiles) produced by the women are sold directly from dugout canoes that come alongside the yacht. The sea is a consistent 27°C and the visibility is thirty metres.
Belize, to the north, offers the second-largest barrier reef in the world — the Mesoamerican Reef system that runs from the Yucatán to Honduras. The Blue Hole, a collapsed submarine cave 300 metres across and 125 metres deep, is one of the most celebrated dive sites in the world, though the diving is largely for the visual drama of descending into it rather than the marine life. The Turneffe Atoll and the outer cayes are better for the latter.
Honduras’s Bay Islands — Roatán, Utila, Guanaja — sit on the edge of the reef system and have been popular with divers since the 1980s. Roatán in particular has developed a significant tourist infrastructure, but the northern coast and the outer reefs remain quiet. The Spanish colonial history visible in the towns is not the Spanish colonial history of the larger Caribbean islands — it is quieter, less processed, more intact.
