Santa Catalina
A very consistent point and the left reef beside it, at the end of a long road.
Welcome to Playa Venao
Surfing in Playa Venao
Playa Venao is a horseshoe bay on the Azuero peninsula with a sandbar across it, and it is the easiest good decision in Panama.
- 2spots
December gives twenty-six clean days out of thirty, two blown out and two too small. Only Popoyo in Nicaragua returns more, and the figure comes from the same dry-season northerly that grooms Santa Catalina, arriving here across the peninsula from December to April. The wave takes south swell and is best on a falling mid tide.
What makes it unusual is that the reliability arrives on sand, breaking left and right, at a difficulty a first week can handle. Most places make you choose between consistent and forgiving. Rips are the named hazard, which on a bay this shape is the ordinary thing to have pointed out before you paddle.
Cambutal, forty minutes west, is the quiet alternative: beach and reef together, all tides, and it very rarely gets crowded. Nothing is named as a hazard there, though the bottom mixes sand with reef sections, so where you paddle out is worth asking about.
Venao itself has become a small resort strip rather than a village: a few hotels along the bay, places to eat, and enough passing traffic that arriving alone works. It is not Santa Catalina, and for most people that is the point.
Welcome home.
Why Playa Venao?
Consistent and forgiving at the same time
The usual trade is that the reliable waves are the hard ones. Venao breaks it: a sandbar bay with the dry-season offshore behind it, twenty-six clean days in December, and a bottom you can fall on. That combination is what makes it the sensible first week in Central America, and the reason to take Santa Catalina instead is wave quality rather than odds.
Where is Playa Venao?
Getting there
Playa Venao is about four and a half hours from Panama City on good road the whole way, which is half what Santa Catalina costs and most of why it has grown. Cambutal is forty minutes further round the peninsula.
Best surf spots in Playa Venao
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