By Mike Power
BOQUETE, Panama — Perched on a volcanic plain in the highlands of western Panama, Casey Koehler’s luxury mansion looks like a slice of prime Florida real-estate beamed down to Central America.
Diamonds flaring in his Rolex watch, the Michigan-born retiree sits on his porch in the resort of Los Molinos and lists reasons for retiring to a country most Americans his age remember best as the scene of a 1989 U.S. invasion.
“It’s 77 to 82 degrees every day, and it’s spectacularly beautiful,” said Koehler, 65, who moved to Panama last year. “This house cost me $230,000. In Florida it would be $1.5 million.”
Politically and economically stable, its turbulent history all but forgotten by visitors, Panama is luring U.S. and European retiree baby-boomers dreaming of a millionaire lifestyle on the cheap.
Eager to follow neighboring Costa Rica as a magnet for wealthy U.S. and European pensioners fleeing high real estate prices at home, Panama, which uses the U.S. dollar as its currency, is offering perks to retirees ranging from tax breaks to discounts on travel, cinema tickets and fast food.
Much of rural Panama is still dirt-poor with a very basic infrastructure, and while the gleaming skyscrapers of the cosmopolitan capital Panama City are only a short flight from Miami, the city is too hot for most newcomers.
Retirees are instead flocking to the area around Boquete, a cool mountain town famous for growing coffee and oranges, where small wooden houses are decked with tropical fruit and flowers year-round and old men play dominoes in the shade.
U.S. and European retirees are transforming it into a chic enclave with bistros, a 24-hour supermarket and delicatessens.
CHEAP AND CHEERFUL
Boquete is a world away from the image of a typical “banana republic” that stuck in the minds of many baby-boomer Americans who watched television images of the 1989 U.S. invasion to remove dictator Manuel Noriega and the rioting that followed.
Gleaming SUVs jostle for parking space in Boquete’s narrow streets. Foreign pensioners scour bistro menus for low-cholesterol dinners while pouring over maps in search of land to buy. With prices rocketing from $10 to $300 per square meter (yard), there’s a gold-rush whiff in the air.
Koehler, a former Central Intelligence Agency worker, said cheaper living partly drew him to Panama. He said that while he spent $5,000 a month in the United States to live in none-too-opulent style, he now spent only $1,200 a month and wanted for nothing.
Others, like Ramona and Charles Holmes, who moved to Boquete from California last year, dote on its slower, peaceful pace and its unspoiled beauty.
“People thought we were crazy,” says Ramona, a 50-year-old former legal clerk. “They thought we’d be kidnapped. That’s just silly. OK, sometimes we find snakes and tarantulas on our property, but it’s so beautiful here you could cry.”
Developer Sam Taliaferro built Valle Escondido, a 200-home gated community for retirees, on a coffee farm in Boquete. Laughing, sun-tanned pensioners scoot around on golf carts in the landscaped environment. “When we wake up, we say, ‘Wow, we’re in paradise,”‘ he enthuses.
Taliaferro says he wants to haul Boquete, and especially the local Ngobe Bugle indigenous group which once relied on sporadic coffee-picking work for a living, into modernity.
“Now there is something more for the Indians to do than pick coffee,” he said. “They are actually waiting on tables, sitting by computers. They’re moving from a third-world to a first-world economy.”
PARADISE AT A PRICE
However, not everyone is thrilled with the new influx.
Some Boquete locals say the boom, which has pushed up demand, is creating imbalances in its economy which are hitting the Ngobe Bugle hardest, such as localized inflation that is putting products like meat out of their reach.
“We eat meat once a week now. Before, we ate it a little more than that,” said Ngobe Bugle coffee-picker Eric Gomez.
Teacher Johnny Zapata said the new arrivals should adapt to their new natural and social environment rather than trying to change it.
“They want to stop our festivals; they say we are too scandalous,” he said. “Also, the climate is changing as they cut down trees.”
Francisco Serracin of Panama’s Specialty Coffee Association, says some gourmet plantations are being cleared for new homes. “It could become a threat to the industry. There will be very few of us left who believe in coffee,” he says.
Nearby, the church in this devout town has placed a sign in the street bearing a caveat: “Boquetean, if you sell your land, it will die. If you don’t, it will live. Think about yourself and your country.”
A four-by-four vehicle roars past the notice, racing up the mountain to where the coffee bushes droop with jasmine-scented flowers as harvest time approaches.
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