Chiriqui Grande, the city, has a population of 3.014 inhabitants (census 2010). It's just a small town with a port of loading and shipping of oil and two main streets, with many small shops crammed in four or five blocks.
As in Changuinola everything revolves around the banana company, here is the same with respect to the company that makes the transport of oil between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea by means of an oil pipeline across the isthmus. Several storage tanks located in the hills near the town are the best testimony to this.
There is little to see and even less to do but, as with Bocas del Toro islands before, Chiriqui Grande begins to be seen as the gateway to a new world of opportunities: the green of its forests, the transparency of the waters of its rivers, the prolific Chiriqui Lagoon, the Palo Seco Forest Reserve, the influence on the neighboring Peninsula Valiente and Isla Escudo de Veraguas, and the picturesque Ngobe communities, added to the ease of the connection by land with the Pacific side of Panama, especially with the Interamerican Highway, and other districts of the province of Bocas del Toro, make this beautiful area as the next to be explored and experienced by the tide of ecotourism ...
