Darién is a province in eastern Panama. It is also the largest province in Panama. It is hot, humid, heavily forested, and sparsely populated. Europeans first discovered the region in 1501, and Christopher Columbus sighted it on his fourth voyage in 1503.

The Spanish established the first European colony in South America, Santa María la Antigua del Darién, in Darién in 1510. The settlement did not prosper, however, and was soon abandoned. From this town Vasco Núñez de Balboa made his march to the Pacific in 1513. Some of the refugees from Santa María went on to found Panama City in 1519. In 1698, the Scots launched another attempt to colonize Darién: the Darién scheme. It too ended in failure and led to the Acts of Union 1707 which joined the parliaments of Scotland and England (with Wales) into the United Kingdom. Today the chief town in Darién is La Palma, located where the Tuira River empties into the Bay of San Miguel. The province was formed in 1922 from Panamá province. Darién appears in Keats' poem On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer; in the poem, "stout Cortez" is in Darién when he first sees the Pacific Ocean, and this moment is compared to that of Keats's first appreciation of Homer's "pure serene," thanks to the translation of George Chapman (1559-1634). (In fact it was Balboa, not Cortés, who was involved in this historical event.) The Darién Gap is the only gap in the Pan-American Highway along the length of North, Central, and South America.