Sarigua

Sarigua is often called a desert and it looks like one, a cracked plain of pale salt-crusted earth cut into gullies with almost nothing growing on it, but the rainfall here is not desert rainfall. It is an albina, a coastal salt flat, and the bare ground around it is largely the result of centuries of clearance, grazing and the resulting erosion and salinisation, which makes it a lesson rather than a landscape. The area also holds the earliest known human occupation in Panama, with pottery dated to around five thousand years ago found in the shell middens, and mangrove survives along the coastal edge.

What you actually see

• The cracked salt plain - pale ground cut into gullies with nothing on it.
• The archaeology - among the oldest pottery found in the Americas.
• The mangrove edge - surviving forest along the coast.
• The lesson - a landscape produced by clearance rather than climate.

When to go

December to April is the dry season, when the ground is at its most cracked and the light hardest. Early morning and late afternoon are the only comfortable hours; there is no shade at all. It takes about two hours.

Honest expectations

There is very little here in conventional terms: a bare eroded plain, a small interpretation centre that is often unstaffed, and no facilities. It is genuinely hot and exposed. Visitors expecting a true desert will find degraded farmland, which is the point but is not scenic. Signage is minimal.

Nearby

Chitré is twenty minutes south; the Azuero towns are beyond.