Travel and Tourism in Costa Rica

Arenal Volcano and the Hot Springs Region

The Arenal Volcano region in the northern lowlands of Costa Rica has been, for several decades, the most visited destination in the country outside of San José. The reasons are not difficult to understand. The volcano itself, almost perfectly conical in shape, is one of the most visually dramatic volcanoes in Central America. The town of La Fortuna at its base is well-organized and tourist-friendly. Hot springs heated by geothermal activity bubble up across the region, creating a range of bathing options from simple natural pools to luxury resort spas. The Arenal Lake, one of the largest lakes in Central America, provides world-class conditions for windsurfing, kitesurfing, and kayaking. And the surrounding forest, including the Arenal Volcano National Park and several private reserves, contains abundant wildlife and well-developed trail systems.

Arenal was one of the most active volcanoes in the Americas from 1968, when a catastrophic eruption killed approximately 87 people and destroyed the town of Tabacón, until 2010, when the volcano entered a period of relative dormancy. During its forty-two years of active eruption, Arenal produced lava flows, ash clouds, and pyroclastic events that made it simultaneously terrifying and magnetically beautiful. Travelers in the 1990s and 2000s could watch lava flowing down the volcano's flanks at night, a spectacle unlike anything available anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The volcano's current dormancy has reduced this dramatic nighttime display, but Arenal remains an impressive sight, and scientists continue to classify it as potentially active. Steam and gas emissions are visible on most days, and the park continues to monitor seismic activity carefully.

La Fortuna, the small town at the foot of the volcano on the eastern side, has transformed itself over the past three decades from a quiet agricultural community into a well-organized tourism hub with a wide range of accommodation, restaurants, tour operators, and services. The town itself is not particularly remarkable architecturally, but its location, with the perfect cone of Arenal rising directly above it and the surrounding forest providing a constant backdrop of green, is extraordinary. The main street of La Fortuna is lined with tour companies offering every conceivable outdoor activity: canopy zip lines, hanging bridge walks, white-water rafting, ATV tours, horseback riding, and hiking.

The La Fortuna Waterfall, a 70-meter cascade that drops from a basalt cliff into a clear pool surrounded by rainforest, is one of the most visited natural attractions in the region. The walk down to the waterfall is steep, approximately 500 steps, and the walk back up is considerably more strenuous, but the payoff is a swimming hole of exceptional beauty. The cold, clear water at the base of the falls provides welcome relief from the hot lowland temperatures, and the surrounding forest often provides wildlife sightings along the trail.

The hot springs of the Arenal region are one of its signature attractions. Geothermal activity heats water beneath the surface to high temperatures, and this water emerges in springs that have been developed into a range of bathing experiences. The Tabacón Hot Springs resort, built on the site of the 1968 eruption that destroyed the original town of Tabacón, is perhaps the most famous and dramatic, channeling geothermally heated water through a series of cascades, pools, and river systems surrounded by tropical garden plantings. Baldi Hot Springs offers a larger, more resort-style experience with multiple pools at different temperatures. For travelers seeking something more natural and less developed, there are simple thermal pools accessible by a short walk from the road, used primarily by local families.

Lake Arenal, the 85-square-kilometer reservoir created by the Arenal Dam, stretches west from the volcano toward the Tilarán mountains. The lake is one of the best windsurfing and kitesurfing destinations in the Americas, receiving consistent strong trade winds that make conditions particularly excellent from December through March. The town of Tilarán on the lake's western shore has developed a small but dedicated following among wind sports enthusiasts from around the world. Beyond wind sports, the lake offers excellent fishing for rainbow bass, or guapote, and the road along its northern shore passes through dramatic scenery combining lake views, cloud forest, and cattle country.

North of La Fortuna, the Caño Negro Wildlife Refuge offers a different kind of wildlife experience from the volcano and hot springs. This lowland wetland refuge, located near the Nicaraguan border, is accessible by boat tours from Los Chiles and provides outstanding opportunities to observe freshwater wildlife including caiman, river otter, anhingas, roseate spoonbills, jabiru storks, and large concentrations of migratory waterfowl. The calm boat tours through the refuge's river channels are particularly rewarding for birders and photographers, as the wildlife shows little fear of boats.

The hanging bridges tours in the Arenal region allow visitors to walk through the forest canopy at heights of up to 60 meters above the ground, experiencing the upper layers of the rainforest ecosystem from the perspective of the wildlife that lives there. Several private reserves around the volcano offer hanging bridge experiences, ranging from simple suspension bridges on forest trails to elaborate aerial walkway systems with multiple connected platforms. These tours are particularly rewarding for birders and anyone interested in the epiphytic plants, bromeliads, orchids, and ferns that festoon the upper branches of the forest.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Costa Rica

Costa Rica holds four UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a remarkable number for a small developing country, and each of them represents a different dimension of the country's extraordinary natural and cultural heritage.

The Cocos Island National Park was first inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997 and extended in 2002. Cocos Island, this remote oceanic outpost 550 kilometers off the Pacific coast, is one of the finest examples of an isolated tropical island ecosystem in the Pacific, supporting endemic species found nowhere else on Earth alongside one of the most spectacular concentrations of marine life on the planet. The island has been under strict protection as a national park since 1978, and access is controlled to scientific researchers and licensed dive expedition vessels. The underwater environment around Cocos, with its schooling hammerheads, whale sharks, and extraordinary fish diversity, is consistently ranked among the top three dive sites in the world.

The Area de Conservación Guanacaste, encompassing the dry tropical forests and volcanoes of the Guanacaste region, was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1999 and extended in 2004. This conservation area, which includes Santa Rosa National Park, Rincón de la Vieja National Park, and several other protected areas, protects the most significant remaining example of Mesoamerican dry tropical forest, a habitat type that has been reduced to less than two percent of its original extent by agriculture and development. The conservation area is also renowned for its research into conservation biology, particularly the ongoing restoration of degraded dry forest through natural regeneration processes, pioneered by biologist Daniel Janzen and his collaborators.

The Talamanca Range-La Amistad Reserves and La Amistad National Park were inscribed in 1983 and extended in 1990, shared with neighboring Panama. This transboundary conservation area, by far the largest protected wilderness in Central America, protects the full range of highland ecosystems from lowland tropical forest to cloud forest to high-altitude paramo and the permanently cold summit zones of the Talamanca cordillera. The La Amistad park is home to the Bribri, Cabécar, and other indigenous peoples who have maintained their cultures and land relationships in these mountains for centuries. The park's exceptional biodiversity includes populations of the Baird's tapir, the jaguar, the ocelot, the puma, and dozens of other large mammals increasingly rare or absent elsewhere in Central America.

The Precolumbian Chiefdom Settlements with Stone Spheres of the Diquís, inscribed in 2014, recognizes four archaeological sites in the Osa Peninsula and Diquís Delta region that preserve the most significant collection of the mysterious stone spheres created by a pre-Columbian culture in the centuries before the Spanish arrival. These perfectly rounded granite spheres, ranging from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter, represent one of the most distinctive and enigmatic artistic achievements of the Americas, and the archaeological sites associated with them preserve the social context of their creation, including raised mounds, paved surfaces, and burial areas that illuminate the sophisticated chiefdom-level society that produced them. The Finca 6 site near Palmar Sur is the most accessible of the four inscribed sites and features the largest and best-preserved collection of spheres in their original landscape setting.

Festivals and Cultural Events

Costa Rica's calendar of cultural events reflects the country's complex heritage, combining Catholic religious traditions inherited from Spain, indigenous cultural practices maintained by the country's native communities, and the distinctively Tico traditions that have developed over centuries of national identity formation.

The most universally celebrated holiday is Christmas, observed from early December through January 2 with a festivity that builds in intensity through the month. The Festival of Light, held in San José on the Saturday closest to December 15, illuminates the capital with elaborate light displays and a parade that draws hundreds of thousands of spectators. The Christmas season is the primary time when traditional tamales are made: Costa Rican tamales, made from corn dough filled with seasoned pork, rice, vegetables, and other ingredients, then wrapped in banana leaves and steamed, are prepared in enormous quantities by extended families working together over several days. The communal making of tamales, a tradition maintained even by Costa Rican families living abroad, is one of the country's most significant cultural continuities.

April 11, Juan Santamaría Day, is the national holiday commemorating the 1856 Battle of Rivas and the heroism of the young drummer boy who sacrificed his life to burn William Walker's fort. The day is celebrated with parades, school events, and cultural performances throughout the country, with particularly significant events in Alajuela, the city closest to the birthplace of the national hero.

The Carnaval de Limón, held in Limón on the Caribbean coast during the week of October 12, Columbus Day, is the largest cultural festival on the Caribbean coast and one of the most vibrant celebrations in Costa Rica. The carnival reflects the Afro-Caribbean culture of the Limón province, with extraordinary costumes, Caribbean music including calypso and reggae, elaborate floats, and street food representing the distinctive culinary traditions of the Caribbean coast. Visitors who are in Costa Rica during the second week of October and make the journey to Limón for the carnival are rewarded with an experience of Caribbean cultural vitality that is unlike anything available elsewhere in the country.

The Boruca Fiesta de los Diablitos, held in the Boruca indigenous community near Buenos Aires in the southern highlands, is one of the most significant indigenous cultural celebrations in Costa Rica. The three-day ceremony, which falls in late December and early January, reenacts through dance and traditional costumes the historical conflict between the Boruca people and the Spanish conquistadors, with the Diablitos, masked figures representing the Boruca, ultimately defeating the bull, representing the Spanish. The masks used in the ceremony, made from balsa wood and painted with elaborate designs, are among the finest traditional crafts in Costa Rica and are sold to collectors worldwide.

The Oxcart Festival in Escazú, held in March, celebrates the tradition of the painted oxcart with a parade of decorated carts pulled by oxen through the streets of this San José suburb. The festival includes traditional music, food, and craft demonstrations and is one of the most authentic celebrations of traditional Costa Rican rural culture available to visitors. The oxcart workshops of Sarchí, in the Central Valley, welcome visitors year-round and provide the opportunity to watch artisans painting the intricate geometric designs on cart wheels using techniques passed down through generations.