Rubén Cantú Airport

Rubén Cantú Airport (IATA: SYP, ICAO: MPSA) serves Santiago de Veraguas — the capital of Veraguas Province and the mid-point of Panama's Interamerican Highway corridor. At 108 meters above sea level in the agricultural center of the country, SYP is the least glamorous of Panama's regional airports in terms of immediate surroundings but the most strategically valuable for travelers targeting two of Panama's greatest natural attractions: Santa Catalina surf and Coiba National Park.

Santa Catalina is a small fishing village on the Pacific coast of Veraguas, 1.5 hours from Santiago by road. The surf break at Santa Catalina — a right-hand point break over a rock and sand bottom — is widely considered one of the finest in all of Central America: powerful, consistent, with long rides on good swells and enough volume to accommodate the modest number of visitors who make the journey. International surf media consistently rank Santa Catalina among the top five Pacific surf destinations in Latin America.

Coiba National Park — accessible by boat from Santa Catalina (90 minutes each way) — is one of Panama's most extraordinary ecological destinations. The park encompasses Coiba Island (the second-largest island in the Pacific coast of Central America), 38 smaller islands, and the surrounding marine environment. Until 2004, Coiba served as Panama's most feared penal colony — the combination of its island geography and the Coiba shark population made escape effectively impossible. This enforced isolation preserved the island's ecosystem to an extraordinary degree: Coiba's forests have never been logged, its reefs have never been dynamite-fished, and its wildlife population — including the largest population of scarlet macaws in Panama — is essentially undisturbed. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2005.