Location
Panama’s Selva Santa Fe Biological Reserve & Nature Retreats is located 30 minutes (33 km/20 miles) driving from the capital of Panama’s province Coclé, near the abandoned hamlet of Santa Fe.
This puts it a 2 to 2.5 hour drive away from Panama City.
Up to Penonomé you can drive a 4-lane highway. From there it’s about 16 km (10 miles) to La Pintada, a quaint little town. Another 10 km ( 6 miles) takes you past the village of Llano Grande and its road to Coclesito (Caribbean) and to the exit that leads to our project site. Up to here you can drive an excellent 2-lane road. From this exit, the last 6 km (4 miles) are dirt road of which the last 2 km- starting at the hamlet of Palmar Arriba are 4WD only during the rainy season.
We plan to fix this last 4WD-only part in early 2011. The remaining dirt road part is slated to be asphalted in the near future as it leads to villages with schools. More importantly, there is an excellent gravel road to Coclesito will be continued to the Caribbean coast in the next 2 years. This road continues to the Petaquilla goldmine which is only 3 miles away from the coast! Eventually this road will be fully paved and be continued along to coast to be connected to Colon. This puts our property along a strategic road in Panama which will greatly benefit property values (we expect a 200-400% increase in a 3-5 year time frame).
Electricity is currently 4 km away (November 2010) but the electricity company is currently working on getting power to Palmar Arriba. That would mean we’re only 2 km (1-1/2 miles) away from electrical power. But given the water resources in our property and the desire to use renewable energy, we will use the power of water in our many streams: in our first stage we plan a small hydropower plant!
More studies have to be conducted but there is enough power potential year-round to supply 40 energy-efficient houses when we allow solar power to assist hydropower capacity during the dry season.
The map below is a screenshot of Google Earth showing the road and the project outline. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, let us know and we’ll send you a ‘kmz’ file which you can load into Google Earth and use all its features.
Below a gallery of more maps and pictures of the area around Coclesito. We would like to buy a small beachfront property in this area eventually to serve owners and guests of our Santa Fe project.
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