Hotel Review • North America • Panama
Inside Ordovician Beach Resort: The Luxury Property Galvanizing People to Visit Panama's Caribbean Coast
Overwater suites, a private beach inside a UNESCO site, and a staff drawn almost entirely from the surrounding villages. I checked in for a few nights to see what OBR’s all about.
Credit: Ordovician Beach Resort
BY NOAH CORTEZ
Why it works
Hotel Snapshot
Panama's Caribbean side doesn't get the attention its Pacific coast does, but it absolutely should. Ordovician Beach Resort sits on Isla Grande in Colón province, inside Portobelo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site with crystal-clear water and lots of jungle wildlife. The resort opened in 2025 on the bones of an older property, and it's the first place in the Costa Arriba region to do overwater suites, a private beach, and a helipad. The forty-seven room property is the brain child of founders Rick and Loan Hill, who left tech careers in Silicon Valley and put the money into a coastline most developers had written off. And, as I learned over dinner with Rick and Loan, Ordovician Beach Resort was built with almost entirely local labor and runs on a regional hiring model, so the person checking you in, cooking your dinner, and guiding your dive most likely grew up within a few miles of the beach.
Design & Character
Each guest building is themed around an animal, with the motif carried through in hand-painted mugs, hand-stitched pillows, and stained glass, and the headboards were lacquered out of trees by a local artist. Work by Panama City-based artist Nereida Villarreal supplies most of the color inside, set against a white-and-blue palette that borrows directly from what's outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Out on the water, the Hills built a lagoon ringed by a sandbar so families have somewhere calm to swim, complete with an enclosed platform where kids can build sandcastles without anyone having to be worried about the rising tide. Past the pier, a jetty creates a flat emerald stretch of water that’s the best place on the property to float and forget about all your responsibilities. The less visible engineering is just as deliberate: the resort runs its own desalination plant and makes its own fresh water rather than shipping it across from the mainland, I was able to tour the facility and learned that the water produced by the plant is what waters the plants in the garden (that the kitchen uses to cook the resort’s food), as well as supplies all fresh water for drinking, showering, and plumbing for the resort.
The Rooms
All 47 rooms and suites face the water, wrapped in tropical flowers, and the overwater suites are the reason people will book this place (very Maldives-esque if you ask me). I stayed in one, and it came with an outdoor tub, a terrace with steps running straight down into the sea, and a glass panel set into the floor inside the suite so you can watch whatever is swimming under the room. I thought the glass floor was a great detail, but if the idea of open water beneath your feet unsettles you, there's a rug that covers it. My favorite part, though, was waking up to the sound of the ocean every morning.
Turndown happens properly in the evening, too, which was a great thing to return to after a long day outside. Inside, the palette stays crisp white and blue with jewel-toned accents and fresh orchids, and the stained-glass animal motif of your room mirrors where your room is situated on the island (for example, my suite’s motif was a whale, while some rooms closer to the jungle had a macaw as their animal motif).
Credit: Ordovician Beach Resort
Food & Drink
There are three open-air restaurants on site, and more than 90 percent of the produce feeding them is grown in the resort's own organic garden. On a tour of the garden, I learned that some of the produce, such as the tomatoes, are special to the resort, and can’t be found in supermarkets on the mainland or even the surrounding islands. Farm to table dining is quite literally a centerpiece of the F&B concept, and you can revel in the fact that you know exactly where your food’s coming from. (At the time of writing, a gnarly cyclospora outbreak due to contaminated fresh veggies is affecting a lot of the U.S., and I took advantage of eating all the vegetables I wanted while staying at OBR because everything was grown on-site.) As far as the actual restaurants themselves: The Shell is the all-day bistro doing poolside breakfast and lunch with Panamanian flavors bent through global influences, El Acuario is a more formal concept where Japanese, Vietnamese, Caribbean, and Panamanian cooking meet, and Rick's Café Americain is the breezy over-the-water tapas and pizza spot, named for the bar in Casablanca.
The kitchen is run by executive chef Stiven Hernandez, and the drinks are worth as much attention as the food: mixologist Aquilino Kantule draws on his Guna heritage from the San Blas islands for a long list of fruit-forward cocktails and mocktails, many finished with edible flowers cut from the farm that morning. And the staff were extremely helpful, too: A specific thank you to José, who steered me through the menus and nailed every recommendation he gave. My first evening he pointed me toward the beef stir fry, which I later learned is Loan Hill's family recipe for shaking beef, carried over from her Vietnamese heritage and now living on the menu of a resort on the Panamanian Caribbean.
Spa & Wellness
The spa is built around an overwater wellness platform used for massages, yoga, and meditation, with a sauna and a cold plunge on site, too. My massage opened with infused fruit water and a foot soak in water infused with sea salt, herbs, and lemon.
There's also a small beachside gym (indoors) with cardio equipment and free weights, if you are looking to keep your routine up.
Amenities
The most appealing amenity is the on-site dive center, newly PADI-certified and built because Rick Hill is a serious diver. Conditions suit beginners and experienced divers equally, the water is warm year-round, and the guided options run from a nearby coral cave to learning how to spear invasive lionfish, which is the rare activity that's both fun and ecologically useful. Above the surface there are kayaks and stand-up paddleboards for the lagoon and the jetty, snorkeling straight off the beach, and sport fishing, plus a tour of the organic garden that's worth taking even if you think you don't care about agriculture.
The excursion I enjoyed the most during my stay was a boat tour around the islands. The resort's experience manager runs curated trips out through the area, and mine took in Mamey Island with a snorkel stop along the way. Two on-property activities are also worth your time: a hands-on coconut oil class at Rick's Café Americain, where you work with local coconuts and leave with a jar of what you made, and a cocktail and mocktail session with the resident mixologist, which is where I saw the fresh fruits from the farm come into play with the various syrups and extracts used in the resort’s beverage program. Wildlife counts as an amenity here too, since macaws turn up on the property often.
The neighborhood
Isla Grande is a small car-free island off the Costa Arriba coast of Colón, and the surrounding area is a very important part of Panamanian history. Portobelo, just across the water, was one of the most important Spanish ports in the Americas, and the ruins of its forts are still standing and still worth an afternoon. The wider national park protects both the reef and the rainforest, which is why the diving and the birding are as good as they are this close to shore.
San Blas, one of the most beautiful archipelagos in the Caribbean, is close enough to visit for the day. The Hills have also committed to a foundation funding education, infrastructure, and wellness projects across the nearby communities, with a school and a sports complex in the works.
In terms of getting here, Panama City’s Tocumen International airport is roughly two hours away by road plus a 10-minute boat crossing, or you can arrive by helicopter to the resort's own helipad if that's your budget. (There was a group of wealthy Panamanians who flew their helicopter in just for lunch at the resort’s restaurant.)
Fast Facts
Location: Isla Grande, Portobelo National Park, Colón province, Panama
Vibe: Family-friendly beach resort with overwater suites in a location that isn’t the Maldives
Rooms: 47
Pricing: From $437 per night
Dining & Cocktails: The Shell (all-day bistro), El Acuario (Japanese, Vietnamese, Caribbean, and Panamanian), Rick's Café Americain (overwater tapas and pizza), all supplied by the on-site organic farm
Amenities & Services: Dive center, kayaks and stand-up paddleboards, snorkeling, sport fishing, island and canal tours, private beach, family lagoon with sandbar, spa with overwater platform, sauna, cold plunge, cryotherapy, beachside gym, helipad, boat transfers, WiFi
Closest airport: Tocumen International (PTY), roughly two hours by road plus a boat crossing; helicopter transfers available to the on-site helipad
Gallery
A closer look
Credit: Ordovician Beach Resort
Credit: Ordovician Beach Resort
Credit: Ordovician Beach Resort
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