Santa Fe de Veraguas

Everyone I met on the road up to Santa Fe de Veraguas told me some version of the same thing: this is what Boquete was like twenty years ago, before the cafés and the retiree developments and the tour buses. I arrived skeptical of that kind of nostalgia-marketing, and left largely convinced it was true. The town sits in the central highlands of Veraguas province, a region most travelers skip entirely on the way between the capital and Bocas del Toro, and the result is a place that has kept its working character almost fully intact.

The road in itself is part of the draw — a winding climb through cloud forest and coffee farms with views that opened up unexpectedly at every switchback, cattle grazing on slopes steep enough to make me wonder how they kept their footing. Santa Fe’s cooler microclimate, similar to Boquete’s but without the crowds, has made it a center for orchid cultivation, and a small farm just outside town let us wander among hundreds of species in bloom, a riot of color against the grey mist that rolled through most mornings.

The waterfalls are what genuinely surprised me — Alto de Piedra and Bermejo, both reachable by short hikes from town, cascade through forest so undisturbed that we had each one entirely to ourselves on a Saturday afternoon, a level of solitude that would be unthinkable at a comparable spot near Boquete. The town’s Friday market, smaller and far less curated than El Valle’s, still gathers coffee growers and vegetable farmers from the surrounding hills, and I bought a bag of locally roasted coffee from a woman who grew, roasted, and sold it herself within a five-kilometer radius.

When to go: The dry season, January through April, keeps the trails to the waterfalls firm and the mountain roads passable without the mudslide risk that heavier rains bring later in the year.