🇵🇦 Panama · Cordillera Central and Coclé
El Copé is a mountain village in Coclé province that serves as the gateway to Omar Torrijos Herrera National Park (popularly known as El Copé National Park), a protected area of cloud forest sitting astride the continental divide in Panama's central cordillera. The park protects rainforests of great biodiversity, with lush flora and fauna and a cool, extremely humid climate.
It's one of the few places in Panama where, on exceptionally clear days and from certain points, you can make out both the Pacific and the Caribbean slopes, thanks to its position on the watershed. The park is a paradise for nature lovers, especially for birdwatching — with cloud-forest species — and for hiking through mist-wrapped woodland.
This guide covers the practical side of visiting El Copé and Omar Torrijos National Park: the trails, the birdwatching, park admission and facilities, where to sleep and eat in the village, and how to get here from the Pan-American Highway.
Omar Torrijos Herrera National Park, around the village of El Copé, was created in 1986 to protect the cloud forests of Coclé's central cordillera and carries the name of the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, who died in a plane crash in these mountains in 1981. Today it is a destination for ecotourism, hiking and birdwatching. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The central province of the 'Arco Seco', between the Pacific and the mountains: cradle of the pre-Columbian goldwork of Sitio Conte and El Caño, of Natá de los Caballeros (1522), of the crater town of El Valle and of the beaches of Farallón.
Read the history of Coclé →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Omar Torrijos Herrera National Park, reached through the village of El Copé, protects a slice of the cloud forests of Panama's central cordillera, in Coclé province. Its position on the continental divide — the line separating the waters that run to the Pacific from those that run to the Caribbean — gives it a singular geography and climate: permanently damp forests wrapped in mist, with lush vegetation of mosses, ferns, bromeliads and orchids.
Being high-altitude cloud forest generates extraordinary biodiversity. The park is home to numerous species of flora and fauna, including birds characteristic of these environments, amphibians and mammals, many of them adapted to the humidity and the cool mountain temperatures. That biological richness is one of the main reasons for its protection and for its appeal to naturalists and birdwatchers.
Its position on the divide also explains one of its most talked-about quirks: on exceptionally clear days, from certain points in the park it's possible to make out both the Pacific and the Caribbean slopes at once, an uncommon experience that has helped build the place's reputation among those who travel Panama's wild side.
The park carries the name of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, one of the most influential figures in 20th-century Panamanian history. Panama's de facto leader through the 1970s, Torrijos is remembered above all for negotiating the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties with the United States, which set out the return of the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty, a decisive milestone for the country.
In 1981, Omar Torrijos died in a plane crash when the light aircraft he was travelling in came down in the mountains of Coclé's central cordillera, in the area the park occupies today. The tragedy shook the country and wrapped his figure in a mythic aura. In his memory, the protected area created in these mountains was officially given his name, though it's still popularly known as El Copé National Park, after the nearby village.
So the park has not only exceptional natural value but also a symbolic and historical weight tied to Torrijos's memory and to an episode that marked Panama. For many visitors, walking these forests also means drawing close to a place laden with meaning in the country's recent history.
The park was created out of the need to protect the fragile cloud forests of the cordillera, a source of water for the region and a refuge for biodiversity threatened by the advancing agricultural frontier and logging. Under the administration of Panama's environmental authority, today the Ministry of Environment (MiAmbiente), the area has rangers, trails and basic infrastructure for visitors.
The village of El Copé, on the flanks of the cordillera, works as the gateway and base for anyone visiting the park. A rural community in Coclé with a farming tradition, it has gradually taken on a fledgling range of tourist services — simple guesthouses, eateries and local guides — linked to the flow of hikers and nature watchers drawn here by the forests.
Ecotourism has thus become an opportunity to reconcile conservation with local development. Birdwatching, hiking in the cloud forest and the search for the lookouts from which, with luck, both oceans come into view are the main activities. The challenge, as in so many protected areas, is for that tourist activity to help preserve the forest and benefit the communities around it.
Before the park existed, the mountains of Coclé's central cordillera were, from the 19th century into the early 20th, a territory of peasant colonization. Families from Panama's interior worked their way up the flanks of the cordillera in search of fertile land for crops and cattle, giving rise to small scattered settlements such as El Copé, whose name comes from a resinous tree — the copey or a related species — characteristic of the region.
This mountain colonization produced a distinctive rural culture, shaped by subsistence farming (maize, coffee, vegetables), smallholding livestock and a deep attachment to the land, in a setting of difficult access, heavy rain and steep soils. Life at these altitudes was for a long time cut off from Panama's major urban centers, on rough tracks that only improved appreciably in the second half of the 20th century.
That same relative isolation ended up being, paradoxically, the reason much of the area's cloud forest is still standing: the difficult terrain limited the advance of logging and extensive agriculture in the higher reaches, preserving the forests that decades later would be declared a protected area.
More than three decades on from its creation in 1986, Omar Torrijos Herrera National Park has established itself as one of the benchmark protected areas of Panama's central cordillera, valued as much for its biodiversity as for its historical significance. MiAmbiente's management has gradually added basic infrastructure — visitor center, signposted trails, rangers — that makes a safe visit possible without stripping the place of its wildness.
The village of El Copé, for its part, has evolved from a purely farming community into one with a modest but growing nature-tourism offering: family guesthouses, local guides trained in birdwatching and hiking, and eateries serving country cooking to visitors. This small-scale tourism sits alongside traditional farm work, without having radically transformed the area's rural identity.
Today El Copé represents a relatively successful case of balance between conservation and local development in Panama: a cloud forest that continues to protect watersheds and biodiversity, a community that has found in ecotourism a complement to its traditional economy, and a name — that of Omar Torrijos — that keeps these mountains tied to a decisive chapter in Panama's recent history.