External Reviews

• The Independent (UK) Hotel Of The Week: Canopy Tower in Panama Nature lovers and birdwatchers can hardly find a better view than at Canopy Tower in Panama. The wonders of the rainforest and its wildlife stretch before you for miles...April 22, 2007

  By Danielle Demetriou Conversations are frequently interrupted at the Canopy Tower in Panama. "Keel-billed toucan on the left!" "Howler monkeys at 11 o'clock!" "Armadillo in the bush!" These are common exclamations, invariably followed by a mass stampede to the nearest window.

  For Canopy Tower is no ordinary hotel. A former US radar station in the heart of the rainforest, it was once filled with military officials defending the Panama Canal. Today, its visitors look out for blue cotingas, sloths and other creatures that inhabit the colourful rainforest here.

  The hotel itself cuts an eccentric figure. The tall, round metal tower, painted in yellow and turquoise, is crowned with a 30ft-high structure resembling a giant tennis ball. Its hilltop vantage point and 360-degree viewing deck provide views of liners gliding along the Panama Canal and the skyline of Panama City.

  Travel and Leisure Magazine – 25 great ecolodges, July 2003 "The geotangent dome emerges from the jungle canopy like a single-scoop ice cream cone on an endless summer lawn. The view is the cherry on top, as birds of every beak and bill (an astonishing 380 species, more than half of what's found in all of North America) perch in the nearby fig and palm trees. Of the 12 simple rooms down below, the best nest is the Blue Cotinga Suite, with its diaphanous canopy bed, plantation wood furniture, and outdoor veranda swing. Almost makes you forget that the showers are water-saving."

  Outside Magazine, September 1999 Nowhere else on earth do the wonders of man and nature collide so abruptly as they do near the banks of the Panama Canal. From my perch atop a radar tower once used to track drug traffickers' planes, I peer out over a lush rainforest canopy that flows across lumpy green mountains. Flocks of veridian parrots buzz the treetops and disappear over the Caribbean horizon to the north. Howler monkeys crash through the foliage below me. And during my visit, nearly a million migrating hawks have been dotting the skies as they fly south toward the Pacific. Stretched out along a 3.5-million-year-old land bridge, Panama is the ultimate ecological crossroads, a habitat for more than a thousand bird and animal species whose northern- and southernmost ranges overlap, with the result that a country one-fifth the size of California claims a greater variety of species than the entire United States. By Alex Markels