Batimentos Island National Marine Park The Panamanian

Caribbean is indescribably beautiful. Its warm blue waters, mangrove swamps, keys and beaches of the finest sand make it a veritable natural paradise. Basitmentos Island National Marine Park, which includes part of the extensive archipelago of Bocas del Toro, boasts all the above-mentioned natural and landscape features. The green islands of the extensive Bocas del Toro Archipelago, with their thousand-year-old forest, rise out of the blue crystalline waters of the El Almirante Lagoon as the only obstacle between the great Caribbean Sea and the coasts of the mainland. They form a lovely collection of coral reefs, white-sand beaches and estraordinarily beautiful mangrove islands. The Bocas del Toro Islands not only embody amazing natural beauty and a cultural richness from the Guaymi and Afro-Caribbean populations, they also a living laboratory, which, over the centuries, has been the scene of evolutionary processes and plant and animal movements of great interest to scientists. The Bastimentos area is still in the pristine state in which it was first discovered by Admiral Columbus when he sailed through its waters in the sixteenth century. The island, marine and coastal environments that the Park protects are very valuable in terms of scenery, and help to protect an irreplaceable part of the biological diversity and natural heritage of the Panamanian Nation.
The Park's territory includes 1.639 hectares of land on Bastimentos Island and the spectacular Zapatillas Keys, as well as 11.596 hectares of unique reefs, mangrove islands and marine zones not found in any other part of the country. On the north coast of the Park, the strong waves of the great Caribbean break fiercely onto the rocky north coast of Bastimentos Island and Larga Beach, renown as an important marine turtle nesting site.
On the beaches, 4 species of marine turtles, endangered world-wide, come to nest. They include the Pacific Green (Chelonia Midas), the loggerhead (Caretta caretta), and the hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata). On its southern coast, the Caribbean Sea environment changes into the peaceful E l Almirante Lagoon with its many channels and mangrove islands, unique of their kind along the whole Caribbean coast of Panama. Some of those mangrove islands are as big 50 hectares. Surrounded by corals and sandy shallows covered in meadows of sea grass. The Parks has the best conserved coral reefs on the Caribbean coast.
The Bastimentos Island mainly consists of coastline, low-lying sandy coast, plains and hills of volcanic origin that reach a maximun altitude of about 100 meters above sea level. The Zapatillas Keys, at the north-eastern end of the Park, are made up of two islands of 34 an 14 hectares surrounded by spectacular white-sand beaches and coral reefs covering some 500 hectares, where various orders of coral ( Antipatharia, Gorgoniacea, and Scleractinia) live, a lot of kind of lobsters are also common and a wide range of amazing underwater life too.
In the Park's moist tropical forest, over 300 species of vascular plants have been recorded with a predominance of Crabwood, Nispero, Guaruba, Oak and yellow tree. All kind of exotic animals lives in this amazing National Park.