Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to Panama’s Chiriquí province with my parents. Located on Panama’s border with Costa Rica, Chiriquí is home to beautiful landscapes from Pacific beaches to skyscraping mountains. We wanted to visit the mountains of Chiriquí for their unique bosques nubosos, or cloud forests, which are high-altitude forests named for their often-present low-lying clouds.
For four days, we stayed at a private nature reserve and coffee farm bordering Parque Internacional La Amistad, which translates to Friendship International Park. La Amistad is a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organizations Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site. This designation means that the natural or cultural site has “Outstanding Universal Value” and should be protected for future generations.
We could see La Amistad’s value from the first moment we stepped into the park. The cloud forest is home to thousands of species of trees, flowering plants, mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, many of which we saw during our trip. Some of my favorites include the three-wattled bellbird, which has the strangest song, as well as red spider monkeys.
