Taboga was a working port a full century before Panama City moved to its present site. Spanish settlers founded the town in 1524, and the church of San Pedro, raised the following decade, is among the oldest still in use anywhere in the Americas. The island sits roughly 12 nautical miles off the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, close enough that the ships waiting at anchor are visible from its beaches. Its nickname, Isla de las Flores, dates to the nineteenth century, when hillsides of bougainvillea and hibiscus drew visitors from the mainland. Paul Gauguin worked here in 1887, digging on the canal excavation before illness sent him to Martinique. Later the island housed a sanatorium, then a wartime coastal battery; concrete gun emplacements still sit above El Morro, the rocky islet joined to Taboga by a sandbar that surfaces at low tide. Cerro Vigía rises 307 metres behind the town, and the whole southern flank belongs to a wildlife refuge protecting one of the largest brown pelican colonies in the eastern Pacific. The crossing is what shapes the day. Departures leave from Fuerte Amador Resort and Marina on the Amador Causeway, a breakwater built from rock excavated during the canal's construction, and the route runs across the shipping lane where pilot boats and bulk carriers queue for transit. That passage is the reason the all inclusive taboga island catamaran tour became the island's dominant format: a catamaran crosses steadily, carries a galley and a bar, and turns the transfer itself into part of the experience rather than a delay before it. What distinguishes the current generation of Taboga Island catamaran day trips is how completely the day is bundled. The bookable inventory on this page runs from a straightforward full-day beach escape to versions built around lunch, an open bar, and add-ons such as a banana boat. Each all inclusive taboga island catamaran tour follows the same sailing line — out through the anchorage, along the island's northern shore, into the bay below the town — while differing in what waits on board and on the sand. Today Taboga's permanent population is under 1,500. There are no cars of consequence on its lanes, only footpaths climbing between painted houses toward the cemetery and the mirador. The island absorbs its visitors and returns them, sunburnt, to the causeway by late afternoon. It has done a version of this for five hundred years.