The village church on Taboga, San Pedro, was founded in 1524, making it one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere still holding services. That single date explains much about the island. Twelve nautical miles from Panama City, this volcanic outcrop in the Bay of Panama was a Spanish provisioning port before Panama City itself had settled into its stone. Pizarro's expeditions to Peru drew supplies here. Later came pirates, then whalers, then the French and American engineers of the Canal, who used the island as a sanatorium during the yellow-fever years. A taboga island boat tour crosses the same channel those ships once did. The island earned the name Isla de las Flores — Island of Flowers — for the bougainvillea and hibiscus that spill over its whitewashed walls. Paul Gauguin worked as a labourer on the Canal in 1887 and convalesced on Taboga, and the island's colour is often credited with sharpening the palette he carried later to Polynesia. The claim is difficult to verify. The light is not. Today Taboga matters as a counterweight. Panama City is a skyline of glass towers; the island, ninety minutes away by sea or thirty by fast ferry, has no traffic lights and barely any cars. Streets are footpaths. The main lane through town is wide enough for two people and a wheelbarrow. Above the village, a marked trail climbs Cerro de la Cruz toward a summit of roughly 300 metres, where the view takes in the Bay of Panama, the anchored queue of container ships waiting for the Canal, and the neighbouring island of El Morro, joined to Taboga by a sandbar at low tide. The surrounding waters form part of a protected wildlife refuge. Taboga and nearby Urabá host one of the largest brown pelican colonies in the Pacific, and humpback whales pass through the bay between July and October. Municipal authorities levy a modest environmental contribution of 1 USD per visitor to maintain the beaches and trails. Architecturally, the village is unassuming and coherent: single-storey adobe and cinderblock houses painted in ochre, blue and coral, tiled roofs, a cemetery on a slope, and San Pedro's plain white facade anchoring the plaza. There is no grand monument. The interest lies in continuity — five centuries of arrivals by water, at the same small beach, in the same bay. Taboga island boat tour tours follow that inherited line of approach, and the island receives visitors much as it always has.