For much of the twentieth century, the coconut functioned as currency in Guna Yala, counted out by the hundred and traded to Colombian schooners that anchored off the cays. The archipelago that San Blas island tour packages tours reach today runs roughly 226 kilometres along Panama's Caribbean coast, a chain of some 365 islands and cays of which only about 49 carry permanent villages. Most sit less than a metre above sea level. Coral, sand, coconut palm: the material inventory is short. The comarca is not a national park, and its autonomy was won rather than granted. In February 1925 the Tule Revolution ended Panamanian police occupation of the islands; by 1938 the state recognised the territory that is now Guna Yala Comarca, Panama. Roughly 50,000 Guna live in the comarca and in mainland communities along its rivers. Authority still rests with the Onmaked Dummad, the Guna General Congress, where sailas preside from hammocks slung in a communal congress house. Land cannot be sold to outsiders. Visitors enter under Guna terms, and the 22 USD entrance fee for foreign visitors is collected at the boundary rather than at any single gate. The visual signature of the comarca is the mola, layered panels of cotton cut back in reverse appliqué, a technique adapted from body painting after missionaries discouraged it in the nineteenth century. Motifs move between geometric labyrinths and birds, fish, and imported iconography. Boats are ulus, dugouts cut from mainland hardwood and sailed with patched canvas. Village houses are cane and thatch, roofed in palm, with hammocks slung across the interior; freshwater arrives by pipe or by canoe from mainland rivers. Even now, most movement between Cartí, the Lemon Cays and the outer villages — including Guna Yala island hopping tours — happens under paddle or outboard. What makes the place urgent is water. In June 2024 the community of Gardi Sugdub relocated to Isberyala on the mainland, the first planned climate migration of its kind in Panama, after decades of flooding on an island the size of a few football pitches. Other communities are studying the same maps. A San Blas island tour packages tour therefore crosses a working, changing territory rather than a preserved one, an archipelago whose villages, seasons and shorelines are still being negotiated. Tours a las Islas de San Blas, whatever their itinerary, move through inhabited water.