Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a sliver of Central America between Nicaragua and Panama — 51,100 km², smaller than Czechia — and it holds something in the order of six per cent of the planet's known species on roughly three hundredths of one per cent of its land surface. That ratio is the single most important fact about the country and explains almost everything else about it.

The geography does the work. A volcanic spine runs the length of the country, so in one day you can stand on a Pacific beach at dawn, walk through cloud forest at 1,800 metres by lunchtime, and reach the Caribbean by evening. Two oceans, seven active volcanoes, lowland rainforest, dry tropical forest and páramo, all within a few hours' drive of each other, produce an absurd density of ecological niches.

The politics did the rest. Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948 after a short civil war and wrote the abolition into the 1949 constitution, redirecting the money towards education and health. The results are measurable: literacy above 97%, life expectancy around 81 years, consistently high placings in global happiness rankings, and — most relevantly for a visitor — a country that became stable and safe while its neighbours were at war, and had the institutional capacity to protect a quarter of its territory.

The word you will hear a hundred times a day is pura vida — literally "pure life", used for hello, goodbye, thanks, no problem, and it's all fine. It sounds like a tourism slogan and is in fact something closer to a national temperament: unhurried, conflict-averse, and quietly proud of having chosen forests and schools over an army.

The name Costa Rica — "rich coast" — is generally traced to Columbus's fourth voyage in 1502, when he landed near present-day Puerto Limón and saw local people wearing gold ornaments. The gold turned out to be modest and largely traded in rather than mined; the name outlasted the expectation. The official name is the República de Costa Rica.

Costa Ricans call themselves Ticos (and Ticas), from the local habit of forming diminutives with -ico rather than -ito — momentico rather than momentito. It is an affectionate self-description and universally used.

The national symbols are worth knowing because they turn up everywhere: the yigüirro, a plain clay-coloured thrush chosen as national bird precisely because its song announces the coming rains rather than for any beauty; the guaria morada orchid; the vast guanacaste tree; and the white-tailed deer. The blue-white-red flag, adopted in 1848, took its colours from the French tricolore and the ideals attached to it.

The identity that matters most, though, is negative: no army. Ticos will bring it up, and it functions as the country's founding story in the way that revolutions do elsewhere.

Costa Rica sits at about 10° north, with 212 km of Caribbean coastline and 1,016 km of Pacific coast, including the Nicoya and Osa peninsulas. Four mountain ranges — the Cordilleras de Guanacaste, Tilarán, Central and Talamanca — run diagonally through the country, carrying seven active volcanoes: Arenal, Poás, Irazú, Turrialba, Rincón de la Vieja and others.

Far offshore lies Isla del Coco (Cocos Island), 550 km into the Pacific — a UNESCO World Heritage site, uninhabited except for park rangers, and one of the world's great shark-diving destinations. It is reached only by multi-day liveaboard.

Costa Rica borders Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south-east. Distances look small and drive long: mountain roads, single lanes and weather mean 100 kilometres can take three hours.

The classic first-visit circuit is San José → Arenal/La Fortuna → Monteverde → Manuel Antonio or the Nicoya beaches → back to San José, which is roughly a fortnight at a civilised pace. Adding the Caribbean side (Tortuguero, Puerto Viejo) or the Osa Peninsula pushes it to three weeks.

Before the Spanish

The territory was a crossroads between Mesoamerican and South American cultures rather than the centre of either. The Diquís chiefdoms of the south carved the extraordinary stone spheres — near-perfect granodiorite orbs, the largest over two metres across — between roughly 300 and 1500 CE. Their purpose is still not settled, and the sites are now a UNESCO World Heritage listing.

The poorest colony

Spanish settlement from 1561 produced what was, by the standards of the empire, a failure: no large indigenous labour force to coerce, no silver, no gold worth the name, and a colonial capital so isolated that Spain largely forgot about it. Settlers had to farm their own land. That accident of poverty produced a society of smallholders rather than plantation aristocrats — the origin, historians generally argue, of the relative social equality that later made democracy stick.

Coffee, bananas and independence

Independence arrived peacefully on 15 September 1821, along with the rest of Central America; news reportedly took a month to arrive. Coffee, planted in the Central Valley from the 1830s, created the first real export fortune and paid for the railway to the Caribbean, the port of Limón and the extravagant Teatro Nacional. Building that railway brought Jamaican labourers to the Caribbean coast, whose descendants form the Afro-Caribbean population of Limón province. Bananas followed, and with them the United Fruit Company.

1948 and after

A disputed election triggered a 44-day civil war in 1948, the bloodiest episode in modern Costa Rican history with around 2,000 dead. The victor, José Figueres Ferrer, then did something almost unheard of: he abolished the army, wrote the abolition into the 1949 constitution, extended the vote to women and granted citizenship to the Afro-Caribbean population, and handed power to the elected president.

Since then Costa Rica has been a stable democracy, a place of refuge during Central America's Cold War conflicts, and the seat of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. President Óscar Arias won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for the plan that helped end the region's wars. Since the 1990s the country has also reversed its deforestation — forest cover fell to roughly a fifth of the country by the mid-1980s and is now back above half, which is an almost unique achievement.

About 5.2 million people live in Costa Rica, most of them in the Central Valley. The population is predominantly mestizo and of European descent, with a substantial Afro-Caribbean community on the Limón coast, largely descended from Jamaican railway and banana workers; indigenous peoples — Bribri, Cabécar, Boruca, Ngäbe, Maleku, Chorotega — making up around 2.4%; and long-established Chinese and, more recently, large Nicaraguan and Venezuelan communities.

Spanish is official. English is widely spoken in tourist areas, and on the Caribbean coast you will hear Mekatelyu, an English-based creole brought from Jamaica and still spoken around Puerto Viejo and Limón.

The cultural constants are family, football, coffee and Catholicism, though the country is visibly secularising. Sunday lunch with three generations around a pot of olla de carne is close to a rite. Conflict avoidance is a genuine social norm — a Tico is more likely to say sí, tal vez than to say no, which foreigners regularly misread.

The environmental consciousness is real rather than performed. Costa Rica runs on over 98% renewable electricity — hydro, geothermal, wind and solar — has reversed deforestation through a payment-for-ecosystem-services scheme funded by a fuel tax, and protects more than a quarter of its territory. It is also, and Ticos will tell you this themselves, still a country with serious problems: plastic waste, agrochemical use in pineapple and banana monocultures, and coastal development pressure.

Spanish is official and Costa Rican Spanish is clear, slow by Latin American standards and generous with courtesy. Two features mark it out: the diminutive in -ico that gave Ticos their name, and the use of usted where most of Latin America would use tú — Costa Ricans often address family and close friends formally, which surprises other Spanish speakers. Vos is also common.

Addresses are their own language. Costa Rica largely lacks street numbering, and directions are given from landmarks: 200 metres east and 50 north of the old fig tree — where 100 metres means one block, and the landmark may have been removed decades ago. Taxi drivers cope; navigation apps mostly do too, but expect to describe your destination rather than name it.

San José holds about 340,000 people in the city and around two million in the metropolitan area, at 1,170 metres in a valley ringed by volcanoes. Visitors routinely write it off — the traffic is bad, the concrete is unlovely and most itineraries treat it as an airport with a city attached. That is a mistake worth a day or two.

The Teatro Nacional, finished in 1897 and paid for by a tax the coffee barons levied on themselves, is the single most beautiful building in the country and still stages a full programme. Beneath the Plaza de la Cultura, the Museo del Oro Precolombino holds a superb pre-Columbian goldwork collection; the Museo del Jade is better than it sounds and architecturally striking. The Mercado Central, opened in 1880, is where to eat a bowl of olla de carne at a counter.

Barrio Amón preserves the coffee-boom mansions; Barrio Escalante is the food and craft-beer district and the best eating in the country outside a few resort kitchens. Restaurants like Silvestre and Sikwa have built a serious contemporary Costa Rican cuisine on indigenous ingredients — worth planning an evening around.

From the city, half-day trips reach the craters of Poás (subject to closure when the volcano is active) and Irazú at 3,400 m, the Orosi valley, and the coffee estates of the Central Valley slopes.

Arenal (1,670 m) is the postcard volcano: an almost perfect cone above rainforest and a lake. It was thought extinct until 29 July 1968, when it erupted without warning, destroyed three villages and killed around 87 people. It then erupted more or less continuously for four decades — visitors in the 1990s and 2000s watched glowing rockfalls from hotel terraces at night — and fell quiet in 2010. It has been in a resting phase since, which means no lava, and anyone promising you an eruption is selling something.

The geothermal heat remains, and it is the basis of the area's hot springs: the elaborate resorts at Tabacón and Baldí, the smaller and better-value Ecotermales and Los Laureles, and — the local secret — the free public river pools where the hot water enters the Río Chollín under the bridge near Tabacón.

La Fortuna, the gateway town, is the country's adventure hub: canopy zip-lines, hanging-bridge walks at Mistico, white-water rafting on the Balsa and Toro, canyoning, horseback rides and the 70-metre La Fortuna waterfall, reached by around 500 steps down and, more memorably, back up. Caño Negro wetlands to the north are excellent for birds and caimans.

The jeep-boat-jeep transfer across Lake Arenal to Monteverde — about three hours, and far better than the long road around — is the standard and correct way to link the country's two most-visited inland destinations.

Monteverde was founded in 1951 by American Quakers who left Alabama rather than register for the Korean War draft, and who chose Costa Rica specifically because it had just abolished its army. They bought land on the continental divide, set up a dairy, and — crucially — set aside a large watershed as forest. That decision produced what is now one of the most studied cloud forests on Earth.

Cloud forest is not rainforest: it is cooler, wetter in a different way, and its water comes as much from mist captured by vegetation as from rain. Branches are so thick with epiphytes — bromeliads, orchids, mosses — that the trees are barely visible under them. The star species are the resplendent quetzal (best in the March–June nesting season), the three-wattled bellbird with its metallic hammer of a call, and around thirty hummingbird species.

The main reserves are the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, the quieter Santa Elena Reserve, and the vast Children's Eternal Rainforest, bought with money raised by schoolchildren in Sweden and elsewhere from 1987. Hanging-bridge walks at Selvatura and Sky Adventures put you in the canopy; night walks are excellent and genuinely different. And the Monteverde Cheese Factory, still going from the Quaker dairy, is the reason there is decent cheese in Costa Rica at all.

Practical note: the road up is notoriously rough, and the community has repeatedly resisted paving it on the grounds that a bad road limits visitor numbers. Bring a fleece and a rain shell — it is 12–18 °C and often blowing mist.

Manuel Antonio is the country's smallest national park at 1,983 hectares and among its most visited: four crescent beaches backed by primary rainforest, with white-faced capuchins that have learned exactly what a rucksack contains, three-toed sloths in the almendro trees, and agoutis underfoot. Arrive at opening, keep food sealed, and do not feed the monkeys — an instruction that exists because enough people ignored it to change the animals' behaviour.

North, the Nicoya Peninsula and Guanacaste are the beach country: Tamarindo for surf schools and nightlife, Sámara and Nosara for something calmer, Santa Teresa for the surf-and-yoga crowd, Playa Grande for leatherback nesting. This is the dry side, with a real dry season and tropical dry forest — a globally rare habitat protected in Santa Rosa and Palo Verde.

Nicoya is also one of the world's five identified Blue Zones, regions with unusual concentrations of people living past 90. The explanations offered — beans and maize, hard physical work, strong family and community ties, a sense of purpose — are more plausible than most longevity claims, though the data is debated.

South, past Dominical and Uvita — where Marino Ballena's sandbar forms a natural whale's tail and humpbacks pass through — lies the Osa Peninsula and Corcovado National Park, which National Geographic once called the most biologically intense place on Earth. It is the last substantial Pacific lowland rainforest in Central America, holds jaguars, tapirs, scarlet macaws and all four Costa Rican monkey species, and requires a certified guide and advance permits to enter.

The Caribbean side is a different country: wetter, hotter, Afro-Caribbean and Bribri in culture, and much less visited.

Tortuguero National Park has no road access at all — you arrive by boat along the canals or by small plane. The park is a labyrinth of freshwater channels through lowland rainforest, best explored at dawn by kayak or a quiet boat: caimans, river otters, howler and spider monkeys, three species of kingfisher and over 400 bird species. From July to October, green sea turtles nest on the 35 km of black-sand beach, the largest green turtle rookery in the western hemisphere; leatherbacks come earlier, from March to May. Night tours are strictly regulated, guided, and run in cooperation with the conservation programme that has monitored this beach since 1955.

Further south, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is where the country slows to a halt in the best way. Reggae, rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, hand-painted signs, cacao farms in the hills, and the Salsa Brava reef break that is one of the heaviest waves in Central America. Cycle the coast road to Playa Cocles, Playa Chiquita and Punta Uva — genuinely one of the best beaches in the country — and on to the Gandoca-Manzanillo refuge, where rainforest meets a living coral reef.

The Bribri and Cabécar territories inland run community-led visits — cacao processing, medicinal plants, waterfalls — which are among the more honest cultural experiences available in the country because the communities run them themselves.

Costa Rica records well over 500,000 species — around 6% of the world's known biodiversity — including some 900 birds, 250 mammals, 175 amphibians and an estimated 300,000 insects. For a first-time visitor the practical point is that you will see a great deal without trying.

The conservation story is the country's proudest and is genuinely exceptional: forest cover collapsed to roughly 21% by 1987 under cattle expansion, and is now back above 50%, largely through a payment for ecosystem services scheme funded by a fuel tax that pays landowners to keep forest standing. More than a quarter of the national territory is protected. Costa Rica has won UN environmental prizes for it and other countries have copied the mechanism.

It is not uncomplicated. Pineapple and banana monoculture uses agrochemicals at high intensity, coastal development pressure is real, and "eco" is an unregulated marketing word here as everywhere — look for genuine certification (CST) rather than a green logo.

Tico food is not showy. It is honest, fresh and built on rice, black beans, plantain and whatever grows nearby — and after a week of it you understand why Costa Ricans abroad talk about it the way they do. The everyday lunch is the casado, "married man": rice, black beans, fried plantain, cabbage salad, a protein and often a small picadillo, served in a soda — the small family restaurants that are the backbone of eating here and where the food is usually better than in tourist restaurants at a third of the price.

There is no wine industry — the lowlands are too hot and the highlands too wet — but Costa Rica is a serious drinking country in every other respect.

Coffee is the national treasure and the country takes it unusually seriously: growing anything other than arabica has been illegal since 1989. The great regions are Tarrazú, Naranjo, Orosi, Tres Ríos and the Central Valley slopes, at 1,200–1,900 m in volcanic soil. The traditional brewing method is the chorreador — a cloth sock in a wooden stand — and it makes a cleaner, more aromatic cup than the equipment suggests.

Estate tours run at Doka on Poás, Finca Rosa Blanca and dozens of Tarrazú micro-mills, and the good ones cover the whole chain including the economics. The everyday coffee is café con leche or, for children and the hungover, agua dulce — hot water with raw cane sugar.

Guaro Cacique is the national spirit: a clear sugar-cane distillate around 30% ABV, produced by the state-owned FANAL since the 19th century, cheap, and drunk mainly as the chiliguaro — a shot with tomato juice, lime, Tabasco, salt and pepper that is Costa Rica's answer to a Bloody Mary and considerably more fun.

Imperial, in the black eagle can, is the default beer, with Pilsen its main rival; the craft scene has grown fast since the 2010s, with Costa Rica's Craft Brewing Company, Treintaycinco and Numu leading it, and Barrio Escalante in San José as its centre. Ron Centenario is the local aged rum and a genuinely good one.

Costa Rica has two seasons — verano (dry, roughly December to April) and invierno, marketed as the "green season" (May to November) — but the crucial point is that temperature is set by altitude, not season, and the two coasts do not share a calendar.

Best overall: mid-December to mid-April, which is also the most expensive and crowded — Christmas, New Year and Easter week need booking months ahead. Best value: May, June and November. Worst bet: September and October on the Pacific, which are genuinely wet — though they are the best months on the Caribbean, so the trip is still possible, just reversed.

Two international airports: Juan Santamaría (SJO) at Alajuela, 20 km from San José, and Daniel Oduber (LIR) at Liberia in Guanacaste, which is the better arrival if your trip is the northern Pacific beaches. Direct services run from many US cities, Mexico City, Panama, Bogotá, Madrid and, seasonally, several European hubs.

From Prague there is no direct flight: the practical routings are via Madrid (Iberia), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris or a US hub, with total journey times of roughly 16–20 hours and one or two connections.

Visas: Czech and other EU citizens need no visa for tourist stays of up to 90 days. You must show an onward or return ticket and proof of funds; both are checked more often than people expect. There is a departure tax, normally included in the ticket price.

Driving is the standard way to see the country and gives you the roadside stops that make the trip. Take the 4×4 if you are going to Monteverde, the Osa or anywhere unpaved — it is not upselling. Mandatory third-party insurance is added to every rental and is not optional, whatever your credit card covers; budget for it. Roads are narrow, drop-offs are unguarded, and driving after dark outside towns is genuinely inadvisable.

Public buses are cheap, extensive and slow. Shared shuttles (Interbus, Caribe Shuttle) connect the tourist circuit door-to-door and are the sensible middle option. Domestic flights with Sansa reach Tortuguero, Drake Bay, Nosara, Tamarindo and Puerto Jiménez in 30–60 minutes, saving whole days on the Osa and Caribbean routes.

Safety: Costa Rica is among the safest countries in Latin America and violent crime against tourists is rare, but opportunistic theft is common and organised. Never leave anything in a parked car, anywhere, for any length of time — this is the single most frequent way visitors lose things. Use hotel safes, avoid deserted beaches after dark, and be aware that rip currents drown more tourists here than crime harms them: check for flags and ask locally before swimming.

Costa Rica is the most expensive country in Central America and visitors coming from Nicaragua or Guatemala find the jump startling. It is roughly comparable to southern Europe, with park fees and organised activities on top.

Two budget lines catch people out. First, mandatory rental car insurance is added on top of the advertised rate and can double it — the headline price online is not the price. Second, national park entry is per person per park and adds up quickly on a two-week circuit; several parks now require online booking in advance, Manuel Antonio and Chirripó especially.

Money-saving that actually works: eat lunch at sodas, buy the plato del día, use the public buses on long straight routes, travel in green season, and skip one zip-line in favour of one good guide — a naturalist guide will show you more in two hours than a week of walking alone.

The range is wide and the middle is strong: family-run cabinas, B&Bs, small hotels and a large number of genuinely good eco-lodges, some of which are among the best in the Americas at what they do.

Look for the CST (Certificación para la Sostenibilidad Turística), the government sustainability certification, if the eco claim matters to you — "eco" is otherwise an unregulated marketing word and is attached to plenty of places that simply have a garden.

Region by region: La Fortuna has everything from hostels to hot-spring resorts; Monteverde runs to lodges and cabins, often cold at night; Manuel Antonio is the priciest strip in the country, with cheaper options in Quepos; Guanacaste has the large all-inclusives, which are the least Costa Rican experience available; Puerto Viejo is cheap, informal and excellent value; and the Osa and Tortuguero lodges are typically all-inclusive because there is nowhere else to eat.

Book Christmas, New Year and Semana Santa (Easter week) months ahead — the whole country travels then, and prices rise accordingly.

Leave behind: drones without permission (restricted in national parks), and anything you would mind losing from a parked car.

Football is the national sport by a distance. La Sele — the national team — reached the quarter-finals of the 2014 World Cup after topping a group containing Uruguay, Italy and England, which remains the country's greatest sporting moment and is discussed as such. The domestic league is dominated by the San José rivals Saprissa and Alajuelense, and a Saprissa home match is worth going to.

Surfing is the other national obsession and the country is one of the world's best destinations for it: consistent Pacific swell almost year-round, Salsa Brava on the Caribbean for experts, and beginner beaches at Tamarindo, Sámara and Jacó with schools on every corner.

Costa Rica has one Olympic gold — Claudia Poll, swimming, Atlanta 1996 — and produces disproportionate numbers of long-distance cyclists and mountain runners. Whitewater rafting on the Pacuare and Reventazón is world class, and the Pacuare in particular is regularly rated among the best commercially run rivers anywhere.

Two things that are not sports but read like them: corridas a la tica, the bullfights at Zapote where the bull is not killed and volunteers in the ring take their chances instead, and the ox-cart parades, which are contested with entirely serious pride.

Costa Rica consistently ranks at or near the top of press-freedom indices in Latin America and among the better-placed countries globally. The constitution protects free expression, and the country abolished criminal defamation penalties for journalists reporting on public officials — a reform most of the region has not made.

The main outlets are La Nación, the paper of record, the tabloid Diario Extra, which has the largest circulation, the public university station Radio Universidad, and the television channels Teletica and Repretel. The English-language Tico Times, founded in 1956, has moved online and remains a useful starting point for visitors.

The pressures are the ordinary modern ones — concentrated ownership, advertising decline, and periodic friction between presidents and the press — rather than the violence or imprisonment that afflict journalism elsewhere in the region. Foreign journalists work here without accreditation problems, which is one reason the country hosts a good deal of regional reporting.

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Arenal

The near-perfect cone · erupting continuously 1968–2010

Lake Arenal

The jeep-boat-jeep crossing to Monteverde starts here

Monteverde

Cloud forest on the continental divide · founded by Quakers in 1951

Manuel Antonio

The smallest national park, and one of the best

Tortuguero

No roads — you arrive by boat or small plane

Green turtle

July to October · the largest rookery in the western hemisphere

Three-toed sloth

Slow enough that algae grows in its fur

Puerto Viejo

Afro-Caribbean coast · reggae, coconut rice and Salsa Brava

Coffee country

Arabica only, by law, at 1,200–1,900 m

Gallo pinto

Rice, black beans and Salsa Lizano — the national breakfast

San José

Two million people at 1,170 m, ringed by volcanoes

Isla del Coco

550 km offshore · UNESCO site · hammerheads and whale sharks