Even before the electro-dance beats boomthunked around the valley, they told me what was coming; the pony ride guy at the crossroads chapel who went on, at length, about fiestas and drinking getting out of hand. The nearby hotel manager admitted to blocking off rooms to prevent revelers from impacting his older, family-oriented guests. Friends moaned about the noise and traffic. Before dusk I walked over to check it out.

“Valle Bash”, set with the spectacular backdrop of the Cerro Gaital National Park, is a yearly summer all-nighter for Panama’s rich kids. SUVs lined the roads, and party-ready jovenes  lined up to get past security and amble through the broad lawn to the party enclosure. I didn’t stay for the predictable cocktail of youth, money, booze and drugs. As I turned to leave, I saw a drone circling in the sky where I usually saw hawks. Late into the night, DJ-orchestrated Latin pop drowned out the customary croaks and chirps.

Small towns expose people. You know your place more definitely than in a city. In El Valle, pop. 6,000, those rich kids and their parents, Panama’s elite, are derisively called rabiblancos (white assholes). They own most of the land, built extravagant estates on it, and show up on weekends to party. The people who work those estates – the women who cook and clean, the men who wield the weed-whackers – are smaller, browner, uneducated, poor. El Valle is infamously tops in teenage pregnancies in Panama. Few of the campesinos break that cycle.

And what of the foreigners? We’re kind-of part of this place, but transient. Here are snapshots of the expatriates I met over three months;

• Massage therapist, Italian, splits his time between here and Rome with his Panamanian wife and children. Smooth as only an Italian massage therapist can be. Compresses all his appointments into a small number of days to have more free time for his family.

• Ex US Army Ranger. First time in Panama, he landed by parachute in the ’89 invasion. Now a contractor often away doing what former Special Forces types get hired to do. In his free time writes, meditates, eats healthy, travels with his family and finds reasons to pick fights with local petty thugs.

• Central American yoga instructor-agronomist with a world-famous surname, albeit distantly-related. Here with her husband raising a young family and building a business in sustainable local agriculture and promoting an active lifestyle.

• Tennis instructor, American, making a living here in the hospitality industry after doing time in the U.S.  for drug smuggling. Happily mentoring a young North American woman just-released after serving her own four-year jail term in Panama for similar reasons.

• He’s a retired antiques dealer. His partner (also a he) worked in health care administration around the world. Together they have places here, in the US and in Europe. As is often the case with couples, they don’t equally love their location. Too tranquil, not close enough to lakes/rivers, says one.

• Easily bored, he’s built tourism and local development initiatives in El Valle. Divorced, he is searching for companionship and is prepared to go international to find it.

Everybody has a story more complicated than the above conveys. Everyone is from elsewhere and looking for a change of pace and to grow. For them all, El Valle is that place, for now.