Festival de la Cultura Guna

Festival de la Cultura Guna showcases the traditions of the Guna people of Guna Yala, an indigenous comarca on Panama's Caribbean coast, encompassing language, governance, dress, music and oral history maintained through the community's own institutions, the saila leadership and the General Congress.

Guna Yala, formerly known as San Blas until the name changed in 2011 to better reflect the Guna people's own term for their territory, is a comarca indigena on Panama's Caribbean coast, home to the Guna, most of whom live across the San Blas Islands off the mainland rather than on the coast itself, a settlement pattern that developed gradually from the mid-1800s onward as Guna communities moved from riverside mainland settlements onto small islands, seeking shelter from illness, snakes and mosquitoes while staying connected to coastal trade routes and maintaining farms back on the mainland.