Explore Costa Rica

La Fortuna / Arenal

Perfectly cone-shaped Arenal Volcano looms over this small town on the Caribbean-facing slopes of the Cordillera, drawing visitors with hot springs, white-water rafting on the Río Sarapiquí, and rainforest walks where sloths drape themselves over cecropia trees. The lake created by a 1979 hydroelectric dam reflects Arenal's silhouette at dawn, and boat crossings link the eastern shore to Monteverde — a route that feels more adventure than shortcut.

Manuel Antonio

One of the most biologically dense national parks on the planet occupies just 16 square kilometres of Pacific headland here, where white-sand beaches hem a rainforest alive with squirrel monkeys, sloths, and scarlet macaws. The village of Quepos just north serves as the practical base, while the park itself rewards early arrivals who catch spider monkeys at the tide pools before the afternoon crowds arrive.

Monteverde

Straddling the continental divide at around 1,440 metres, Monteverde and its neighbouring community of Santa Elena pioneered the concept of cloud-forest ecotourism in the 1970s when Quaker settlers created a private reserve to protect the resplendent quetzal's habitat. The suspended bridges of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve let visitors walk at canopy height through a world of dripping bromeliads and rare orchids, and the original zip-line — a biologist's method for crossing the forest quickly — spawned an entire adventure tourism industry.

Tamarindo

Long, crescent-shaped Playa Tamarindo has become the beating heart of Guanacaste's surf scene, with consistent beach break waves that teach thousands of beginners their first rides every dry season. Restaurants spill onto the sand, the main street hums with surf shops and soda counters, and leatherback sea turtles still come ashore at nearby Playa Grande despite the development that surrounds them.

San José

Most travellers arrive at Juan Santamaría International Airport on the city's western edge and move on quickly, but the capital rewards those who stay: the gold pre-Columbian collections of the Museo del Oro, the ornate 1897 Teatro Nacional, and the raucous Mercado Central market all belong to a city that feels genuinely Latin American rather than arranged for tourism. The surrounding Valle Central, ringed by volcanoes and coffee fincas, is the cultural and economic heart of the country.

Nosara

Tucked inside a biological reserve on the Nicoya Peninsula, Nosara is four disconnected communities that function as a single destination — surfers for Playa Guiones, yoga practitioners for Playa Pelada, leatherback turtle watchers for Ostional. The road from Nicoya remains famously rough and the airport serves light aircraft, which is precisely why Nosara has preserved the unspoiled quality that brings people here in the first place.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca

Costa Rica's Caribbean coast has a distinct Afro-Caribbean identity shaped by the Jamaican workers who built the railroad in the 1880s and never left, and Puerto Viejo is its most vibrant expression — reggae drifting from open-air bars, jerk chicken on the roadside, and the blue-green waters of Playa Cocles just down the road. The Sloth Sanctuary is nearby, as is the Jaguar Rescue Center, making Puerto Viejo equally beloved by wildlife volunteers.

Santa Teresa

At the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, Santa Teresa and adjacent Mal País form a long strip of dirt-road village that has somehow become one of Latin America's most desirable surf and wellness destinations, drawing a global crowd to its powerful beach break and clifftop boutique hotels. The sunsets here are legendary — the Pacific horizon is unobstructed and the silhouette of fishing boats anchored in the orange light has appeared in a thousand travel magazines.

Jacó

Closest of Costa Rica's Pacific beach towns to San José — just 100 kilometres down the route that crosses the Tárcoles River, famous for its absurd density of American crocodiles basking on the banks — Jacó is the country's most action-packed beach town, with surf schools running at all hours on the grey volcanic sand. Its reputation for nightlife is well-earned but has always coexisted with the raptors circling the Carara National Park across the river.

Tortuguero

Reachable only by boat or small plane, Tortuguero sits on a narrow strip of Caribbean coast separated from the mainland by a network of jungle canals that makes the journey in feel like entering a lost world. The beach here hosts one of the most important green sea turtle nesting sites in the Western Hemisphere — between July and October, hundreds of turtles haul ashore each night — and the canal wildlife viewing at dawn, with manatees and caimans in the same frame, rivals anything in Central America.

Sámara

Sheltered by a coral reef that calms the Pacific swell into a gentle, swimmable bay, Sámara on the Nicoya Peninsula is where Costa Ricans themselves come on holiday, and the unaffected beach town atmosphere reflects that local priority. The calm waters are perfect for beginners learning to surf or kayak to the offshore islands, and the Carrillo lagoon just south attracts the fishing boats that still supply the town's sodas with the day's catch.

Dominical

Between the coconut palms at the end of the hill road from San Isidro de El General, Dominical has a powerful beach break that demands respect — it is not the place for beginners — and a surrounding landscape of waterfalls, jungle pools, and the Nauyaca Waterfalls, reached by a 17-kilometre horseback ride that is itself a draw. Whale-watching season from August to October brings humpbacks right into the bay.

Uvita

The Marino Ballena National Park protects a unique tombolo — a sand spit that extends into the Pacific at low tide in the exact shape of a whale's tail — and at Uvita you can walk to the tip of that tail and watch humpbacks breach in the surrounding waters between August and October. The town is small and unshowy, but the Osa Peninsula gateway atmosphere makes it a useful base for travellers heading deeper into the wild Corcovado country.

Drake Bay

Accessible only by boat from Sierpe or by light aircraft, Bahía Drake (named for Sir Francis Drake who anchored here in 1579) sits at the northern edge of the Osa Peninsula, the remotest and most biodiverse corner of Costa Rica. Corcovado National Park is a short hike away, and the offshore waters are so rich in cetaceans and sharks that dive operations here specialise in routes that larger liveaboards visit only on their way to Cocos Island.

Liberia

The capital of Guanacaste province and the region's main transport hub — Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport brings direct flights from the US — Liberia's colonial centro histórico along Calle Real is one of Costa Rica's best-preserved, with 19th-century adobe houses painted in tropical colours and the ornate 1865 Iglesia La Inmaculada Concepción. The city sits an hour from the best beaches of Guanacaste and 30 minutes from Rincón de la Vieja volcano.

Rincón de la Vieja

The most active volcano in Costa Rica's Cordillera de Guanacaste has a permanent mud volcano at its base that belches sulphurous steam throughout the day, surrounded by a national park whose dry tropical forest shelters tapirs, pumas, and more than 300 bird species. The Las Pailas sector of the park contains the most dramatic geothermal features and connects to white-water rafting on the Río Colorado and the Buena Vista Lodge's famous 400-metre waterslide into a river canyon.

Cahuita

The Cahuita National Park protects Costa Rica's largest coral reef on the Caribbean side, and the snorkelling in the shallow lagoon off Punta Cahuita — amid parrotfish, lobsters, and the occasional sea turtle — requires nothing more than a mask and fins. The town itself is more community than resort, with a main street of wooden Caribbean houses, a reggae bar that has operated for decades, and a friendly, unhurried quality that has survived the tourism wave.

Monteverde Santa Elena

The commercial counterpart to the Quaker-founded Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Santa Elena sits just up the road and runs its own reserve with equally spectacular cloud forest and often shorter queues. The village is where most accommodations, restaurants, and the cheese factory founded by Quaker settlers in the 1950s — still producing the Monteverde brand found in supermarkets nationwide — are actually located.

Puntarenas

Occupying a long, narrow peninsula jutting into the Gulf of Nicoya, Puntarenas was Costa Rica's most important Pacific port for a century before the containerised world bypassed it, and the waterfront malecón retains the faded charm of a once-thriving city. The ferry crossing from here to Playa Naranjo opens the road to the Nicoya Peninsula and is a journey in itself, with pelicans riding the bow wave and frigate birds circling overhead.

Rising from the Pacific some 550 kilometres southwest of Costa Rica's coast, Cocos Island is one of the most remote and biologically rich oceanic islands on Earth — a place Jacques Cousteau called 'the most beautiful island in the world.' Its nutrient-rich waters draw massive schools of scalloped hammerhead sharks, whale sharks, manta rays, and dolphins that circle the island in formations large enough to darken the sea. The island's isolation has also made it a biodiversity laboratory, producing species found nowhere else, including three endemic bird species.

Straddling the border of Costa Rica and Panama, La Amistad is the largest protected area in Central America and one of the region's last true wilderness strongholds, sheltering tapirs, jaguars, and harpy eagles across a dramatic altitudinal sweep from Caribbean lowlands to 3,800-metre peaks. The reserve protects cloud forests that indigenous Bribri and Cabécar peoples have called home for centuries. When UNESCO inscribed it in 1983, La Amistad was recognised as a critical corridor for species that had vanished from the rest of the isthmus long ago.

The Guanacaste Conservation Area represents one of the most ambitious ecological restoration projects in history — a deliberate rewilding of degraded pastureland back into a mosaic of dry tropical forest, cloud forest, and Pacific coastline. The area protects the largest remaining stand of tropical dry forest in Central America, a biome so heavily cleared elsewhere that its insect and plant species remain barely studied. Biologist Daniel Janzen's decades of hands-on restoration work here helped convince UNESCO that Guanacaste was not just preserved wilderness but a living experiment in ecological recovery.

Scattered across the Diquís Delta of southern Costa Rica, the perfectly spherical stone balls crafted by pre-Columbian artisans between 500 and 1500 CE remain one of archaeology's most compelling mysteries — some weighing 16 tonnes and measuring over two metres across, yet almost geometrically perfect without metal tools. The four archaeological sites inscribed by UNESCO preserve not just the spheres themselves but the social landscape of the chiefdom societies that produced them. Because Spanish conquistadors melted down most other evidence of Diquís culture for gold, these stone spheres stand as the civilisation's most enduring monument.