Santa Fé de Veraguas is a mountain town in the cordillera north of Santiago, founded in 1557 and still small. It does quietly what Boquete does loudly — cool air, coffee grown on the slopes, rivers to swim in, cloud forest above — with a fraction of the visitors and none of the retirement-village feel.
The draw is the country immediately around it. The Bulabá and Santa María rivers have swimming holes and a series of waterfalls, the Alto de Piedra ridge above town gets into cloud forest with quetzals in season, and the local orchid growers keep a collection of several hundred species, many of them found nowhere else. The Sunday market brings farmers down from the surrounding hills.
There is little formal tourism infrastructure, which is the point and also the catch: bring cash, expect Spanish, and arrange guiding through your guesthouse rather than an agency.