Colombia–Panama border

There is also a gap in the Pan-American Highway that begins in Turbo, Colombia, and ends in Yaviza, Panama, and is 106 km (66 mi) long.

Road-building through this area is expensive and the environmental cost is high, and no political consensus in favour of road construction has emerged.

The border starts in the north at Cabo Tiburón on the Caribbean coast and proceeds overland to the south-west and then south-east via various peaks of the Serranía del Darién range as far as Alto Limón.

It then proceeds south-westwards, except for a northwards Colombian protrusion in the vicinity of Cerro Pirre, terminating in the south on the Pacific coast at Punto Equidistante.

Archaeological knowledge of this area has received relatively little attention compared to its adjoining neighbors to the north and south, despite the fact that scholars such as Max Uhle, William Henry Holmes, C. V. Hartman, and George Grant MacCurdy undertook studies of archaeological sites and collections here over a century ago that were augmented by further research by Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, John Alden Mason, Doris Zemurray Stone, William Duncan Strong, Gordon Willey, and others in the early 20th century.

There are a large number of sites with impressive platform mounds, plazas, paved roads, stone sculpture, and artifacts made from jade, gold, and ceramic materials.

[2] Vasco Núñez de Balboa heard of the South Sea from locals while sailing along the Caribbean coast.

In 1671 the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan crossed the Isthmus of Panamá from the Caribbean side and destroyed the city.

The first expedition of five ships (Saint Andrew, Caledonia, Unicorn, Dolphin, and Endeavour) set sail from Leith on July 14, 1698, with around 1,200 people on board.

From its contemporary time to the present day, claims have been made that the undertaking was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided leadership, a poor choice of trade goods, devastating epidemics of disease, reported attempts by the East India Company to frustrate it, as well as a failure to anticipate the Spanish Empire's military response.

[8] According to this argument, the Scottish establishment (landed aristocracy and mercantile elites) considered that their best chance of being part of a major power would be to share the benefits of England's international trade and the growth of the English overseas possessions, so its future would have to lie in unity with England.

The land where the Darien colony was built, in the modern province of Guna Yala, is virtually uninhabited today.