The Azuero Peninsula & the Central Highlands

The central provinces have some of the richest pre-Columbian remains in Panama. The chiefdoms of the Gran Coclé culture made painted pottery and hammered gold, and burials at Sitio Conte and El Caño have yielded gold plaques and ornaments. When the Spanish arrived, local chiefs such as Urracá dominated the region, and Urracá's resistance in the mountains of Veraguas in the 1520s is remembered as a national symbol; his face appears on the one-centésimo coin.

The Spanish founded Natá de los Caballeros in 1522, one of their first towns on the Pacific side of the Americas, and settled the plains with cattle ranches. The Azuero became Panama's farming heartland, supplying meat and grain to the transit route, and its towns grew around churches and plazas. On 10 November 1821 the townspeople of Villa de Los Santos issued a call for independence from Spain, the Grito de La Villa, weeks before Panama as a whole broke away.

In the 20th century the region stayed rural while the canal zone boomed. Omar Torrijos was born in Santiago de Veraguas in 1929, and Coiba island served as a penal colony from 1919 until 2004, with a grim reputation under military rule; it became a national park in 1992. The Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, carved from parts of Veraguas, Chiriquí and Bocas del Toro, was created in 1997, and in 2012 Ngäbe protesters blocked the Pan-American Highway to oppose mining and hydroelectric projects on their land, including the Barro Blanco dam on the Tabasará River.

The Azuero is regarded as the cradle of Panamanian folklore. The pollera, the national dress of white cotton embroidered or appliquéd in colour and worn with gold jewellery and trembling hair ornaments called tembleques, is made and worn here more than anywhere, and the Mejorana festival at Guararé each September gathers dancers and musicians from across the country. The mejorana is a small five-string guitar, and the region is the home of décima verse, the tamborito drum dance and the accordion-led música típica.

Festivals are serious business. In Las Tablas, Carnival is a contest between two neighbourhoods, Calle Arriba and Calle Abajo, each with its own queen, floats and morning water-hoses of the culecos. At Villa de Los Santos the Corpus Christi celebrations bring out dancers in devil masks and costumes, and the region's towns each have a patron saint's day with processions.

The Ngäbe-Buglé comarca has a different culture altogether. The Ngäbe, the country's largest Indigenous people, speak Ngäbere, and the Buglé their own language; Ngäbe women wear the brightly coloured nagua dress with zigzag trim, and chaquira bead collars are a signature craft. Communities are governed by their own general congress and traditional authorities alongside the state.

Santiago de Veraguas and Chitré are the main towns, each a busy service centre for its province; Penonomé, Aguadulce and Las Tablas are smaller market towns, and Pedasí, El Valle and Santa Catalina little more than villages. The central provinces supply much of Panama's beef, rice, sugar and seco, and cattle ranches dominate the Azuero's cleared hills. Sugar mills around Aguadulce and Natá, salt pans and shrimp farms on the Coclé coast, and the rum and seco distilleries of Herrera keep rural jobs going, while Coclé's beaches, from Santa Clara to Farallón, have become a strip of holiday homes and resorts.

Life keeps an older rhythm than the capital: early starts, a large midday meal, evenings on the plaza, and weekends given over to cockfights, local baseball and family. Many young people leave for Panama City for work or study, and the Azuero's population is older than the national average. Drought on the peninsula and loss of forest to pasture have become pressing issues.

The Ngäbe-Buglé comarca has mountainous terrain and poor soils that make farming difficult, and education and health care are limited. Many families rely on subsistence farming and seasonal work, including the coffee harvests of Chiriquí and neighbouring Costa Rica.

This is the country's larder, and its food is rural and maize-based. Bollos, maize dough wrapped in husks and boiled, are eaten with fried cheese; tortillas are thick, fried maize patties; and tamales, maize dough with chicken or pork wrapped in banana leaves, are a Christmas and festival dish. Sancocho made with free-range hen, gallina de patio, is the Azuero's pride, and arroz con guandú, rice with pigeon peas, marks holidays.

Beef dominates: tasajo, salted and smoked dried beef, is fried or stewed, and fondas serve steak with rice, beans and patacones. Coastal villages at Pedasí and Santa Catalina cook corvina, snapper and lobster, and fresh white cheese from the Azuero's dairies turns up at every breakfast.

Sweets include cocadas, coconut and sugar sweets, and cabanga, another traditional sweet. Herrera is known for seco, the clear sugar-cane spirit distilled at Pesé, drunk neat, with milk or in the festive mix called seco con leche; the sugar-cane lands also produce Panamanian rum.

In Coclé, El Valle de Antón sits inside a volcanic crater about two hours from the capital, with walks to the La India Dormida ridge and the El Chorro Macho waterfall, thermal pools, a public market and cloud-forest birding. Lower down are the colonial basilica at Natá, Penonomé's plaza, the museum and burial ground of El Caño, and the Pacific beaches around Santa Clara and Farallón.

On the Azuero, Parita keeps a colonial plaza and church, La Arena near Chitré is known for its potters, and Villa de Los Santos has the church of San Atanasio. Las Tablas lives for Carnival, and Guararé for the Mejorana. At the southern tip, Pedasí is the base for Isla Iguana's reefs and beaches, the surf at Playa Venao, and turtle nesting at Isla de Cañas.

Veraguas stretches from coast to coast. Santiago is the provincial capital and crossroads, and the mountain village of Santa Fe de Veraguas has rivers, orchids and trails. On the Pacific, Santa Catalina's beaches draw surfers, and offshore lies Coiba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where divers see reef sharks and rays and humpback whales pass in season.