Costa Rica's tourism follows the rain and the forest it pays for

Why Costa Rica pays landowners for its scenery

The Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento Forestal, FONAFIFO, runs a programme of payments for environmental services under Forest Law No. 7575. It pays the owners and holders of forest and forest plantations for four services the law recognises: the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, the protection of biodiversity, the protection of water for urban, rural or hydroelectric use, and natural scenic beauty for tourism and science. FONAFIFO describes the change as the replacement of a subsidy or incentive with an economic recognition of what a forest provides. The Forest Law was enacted in 1996, and the Wikipedia account of the economy credits it with turning the forestry sector away from commercial timber and the deforestation that came with it.

The forest it pays for is largely forest that came back. Deforestation ran at very high rates from 1973 to 1989 and had been reduced to almost zero by 2005. In October 2023 the government's national brand strategy cited 57.1% forest cover, with 25.5% of the land and 30.3% of the maritime territory under protection. Costa Rica: geography follows the same law from the hillside to the hydroelectric reservoirs.

Tourism grew on that land and largely because of it. The boom began in 1987. Foreign visitors numbered 329,000 in 1988, 1.03 million in 1999 and more than 2 million in 2008, and arrivals grew at an average of 14% a year between 1986 and 1994. The national parks and protected areas are what the Wikipedia account of tourism names as the industry's main advantage, and the survey figures bear it out: in 2006, 54% of international tourists visited a national park or protected area, and they went to at least two, three in the case of European visitors. In 2009 the tourism board counted 47% of international visitors taking part in activities it classed as ecotourism, from trekking and bird watching to visits to rural communities.

Since 1999 tourism has earned more foreign exchange than the exports of bananas, pineapples and coffee combined. The scenic beauty clause in the Forest Law is the point where that income and the forest meet in a single statute.

How tourists enter Costa Rica by air and land

The Costa Rican Tourism Institute, the ICT, counts international tourist arrivals from the migration service's passport scans. Its definition is narrow on purpose. Costa Ricans and resident foreigners are left out, temporary work permits, aircrew and lorry drivers are subtracted, and cruise passengers are excluded by definition, so the figure measures visitors who spend at least one night.

By that measure 2.68 million tourists arrived by air in 2025, 0.8% more than in 2024, with a rebound in the final quarter lifting the year into positive figures. The first four months of 2026 brought 1,195,271 air arrivals, 10.5% more than in the same months of 2025, and the ICT projected about 2.7 million for the year as a whole. Canada rose 26.6% in those four months, against 7.9% for the United States and 11.3% for Mexico, while Spain rose 17.1% and the Netherlands 19.6%.

Two airports take nearly all of it. Juan Santamaría International Airport outside San José handled 831,481 tourist arrivals in the second half of 2025, and Daniel Oduber Quirós International Airport in Guanacaste handled 368,533. The two serve different markets. Of the 109,250 Canadians who arrived in that half year, 69,720 came through Guanacaste and 34,477 through San José, while Mexican arrivals went almost entirely to the capital, 50,585 against 681. Guanacaste's growth was the faster of the two in early 2026, at 14.9% against 7.9% for Juan Santamaría.

The land and river crossings carry a different traffic. They registered 120,452 tourist arrivals in the second half of 2025, of which 72,880 were from Central America. Nicaraguans are the clearest case: 51,850 arrived in those six months and 4,897 of them came by air. The ICT lists the land posts as Paso Canoas, Peñas Blancas, Sabalito, Las Tablillas and Sixaola, with Los Chiles on the river counted among them.

The United States supplied 688,890 of the 1,324,015 arrivals in that half year. Europe supplied 225,703, including Germany at 38,730, Spain at 34,348, the United Kingdom at 29,683 and France at 29,398. The half year as a whole stood below its level before the pandemic, at 1,324,015 against 1,413,045 for the same months of 2019.

When rain falls on each Costa Rican coast

The mountain chain running northwest to southeast divides the country into two slopes, and the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional gives each its own rain regime. The tourist year is easiest to read against the Pacific one, because that is the side most visitors go to.

On the Pacific slope the seasons are well defined. The dry season runs from December to March, April is a transition, and March is both the driest and the hottest month. The dry season begins first in the northwest and last in the southeast, and the rains arrive in the opposite order. The wet season runs from May to October with November as a transition, it eases during July and August in a spell called the veranillo or canícula when the trade winds strengthen, and September and October are the wettest months. On this side the rain comes mostly in the afternoon and the first hours of the night.

The Caribbean slope has no defined dry season: even its least rainy months bring between 100 and 200 mm. Along that coast there are two relatively dry periods, February to March and September to October. The second coincides with the wettest months on the Pacific, and the tourism board's own seasonal guide recommends the Caribbean coast for the autumn months. The wettest Caribbean month is December, fed by cold fronts from the northern hemisphere, and the rain there falls mostly at night and in the morning.

Height does the rest. Mean annual temperature runs to about 27 °C on the coastal lowlands, 20 °C in the populated parts of the Cordillera Central and below 10 °C on the highest summits. San José, at 1,160 metres, has a mean of 21 °C, and its monthly rainfall runs from well under 25 mm in February to more than 300 mm in September, with a yearly average above 1,800 mm in Britannica's figures. Costa Ricans call the dry season verano, summer, and the wet season invierno, winter, which reverses the calendar a visitor from the north brings.

The arrivals track that calendar month by month. The tourism board's guide places humpback whales from the north Pacific off the coast from late December and the southern population from July, and puts turtle watching at Tortuguero and whale watching at Marino Ballena National Park in the green season. Holy Week, in the dry months of March and April, draws crowds, and the guide warns that in the autumn months some hotels and attractions close altogether, above all in the far south.

What the Costa Rican parks are visited for

The protected land is run by the Sistema Nacional de Áreas de Conservación, SINAC, created by Article 22 of Biodiversity Law No. 7788 of 1998 and divided into eleven conservation areas. Its management categories include national parks, biological reserves, forest reserves, protective zones, wetlands, natural monuments and wildlife refuges in state, private or mixed ownership, as well as marine reserves and marine management areas. The Wikipedia geography article counts 29 national parks among them.

The parks took more than 1.2 million visits in 2009, up from 812,000 in 2000 and 510,000 in 1990, and since 2003 slightly more than half of those visitors have been international tourists. Visitors concentrate in a short list: Manuel Antonio, Tortuguero and Cahuita on the coasts, and the parks around the volcanoes Poás, Arenal and Irazú. Irazú, at 3,432 metres, and Poás, at 2,704 metres, both have paved roads running to the rims of their active craters. Arenal, about 90 kilometres northwest of the capital, destroyed two villages in its eruption of 1968 and was still producing lava and breccia into the early twenty-first century.

The parks away from the roads hold the wildlife the country is known for. Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula, is the one park where all four of Costa Rica's monkey species can be found: the white-headed capuchin, the mantled howler, Geoffroy's spider monkey and the Central American squirrel monkey, which lives only on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and a small part of Panama. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, a private reserve, holds about 2,000 plant species, more than 400 kinds of bird and more than 100 species of mammal, and about a third of the country's more than 1,400 orchids. Over 840 bird species have been identified in the country, among them the resplendent quetzal, the scarlet macaw and the three-wattled bellbird.

Three of the protected areas are World Heritage sites: Cocos Island, about 550 kilometres off the Pacific shore and not easily reached for that reason; the Área de Conservación Guanacaste; and La Amistad International Park, shared with Panama across the Cordillera de Talamanca, whose Talamanca range was designated a World Heritage site in 1983. The range holds Cerro Chirripó, the highest ground in the country at 3,819 metres, where the climate above 3,000 metres is páramo. The Camino de Costa Rica, a hiking trail of 280 kilometres promoted by the Asociación Mar a Mar, founded in 2016, crosses from the southern end of the Tortuguero canals on the Caribbean through Indigenous territory near Barbilla National Park and the Los Santos coffee country to Quepos on the Pacific.

Which Costa Rican beaches fly the Blue Flag

The coastline is unequal on its two sides: 1,016 kilometres on the Pacific and 212 on the Caribbean, on the Wikipedia geography article's measure. The tourism board's seasonal guide sends dry-season beach visitors to Tamarindo, Playa Grande, Playa Conchal and Nosara in Guanacaste, to Dominical and Uvita on the south Pacific, and to Puerto Viejo, Playa Cocles and Punta Uva on the Caribbean. Cahuita, on the same Caribbean coast, and Jacó on the central Pacific appear on the Wikipedia list of beaches as well.

The Bandera Azul Ecológica, the Ecological Blue Flag, has graded them since 1996. It was modelled on a European programme of 1985 and assesses the quality of the beach and the sea water, access to drinking water and its quality, the handling of water and waste, security and environmental education, with stars awarded according to how far a beach meets the criteria. Ten beaches won the flag in the first evaluation. In 2008, on the evaluation of 2007, 59 kept it and eight lost it; in 2009, 61 of 81 applicants won it, and two received the maximum of five stars, Playa Blanca at Punta Leona and Playa Langosta in Santa Cruz.

The tourism board added a voluntary Certification for Sustainable Tourism, the CST, in 1997, beginning with lodging and scoring businesses on 108 parameters by 2007. Take-up was slow: in October 2009 about 105 of roughly 3,000 hotels and tour operators held it.

The beaches also carry the country's arguments about tourism. The coast carries a protected maritime public zone 50 metres wide, and disputes over hotels built into it, over a hotel inside a protected area and over construction waste dumped on reefs and in mangroves led to Environment Law No. 7554 of 1995, which requires an environmental impact study before construction is authorised. In Tamarindo and Jacó, foreign buyers of beachfront houses and condominiums pushed property prices beyond the reach of most Costa Ricans. In 2007 the Constitutional Court ordered the national government and 34 local governments to stop dumping sewage into the Río Grande de Tárcoles, and in 2008 the community of Sardinal protested an aqueduct it feared would divert scarce drinking water to new resorts, and by May 2008 the municipality had stopped the works.

Where the Diquís stone spheres can be seen

The World Heritage property of the Diquís lies in the delta of that name in the south. It joined the list at the World Heritage Committee's meeting in Doha in June 2014 and comprises four archaeological sites, Finca 6, Batambal, El Silencio and Grijalba-2, left by chiefdom societies between AD 500 and 1500. They hold artificial mounds, paved areas and burials, and above all a set of stone spheres between 0.7 and 2.57 metres across, whose making, use and meaning remain largely unexplained. UNESCO attributes their survival to thick layers of sediment that kept them buried for centuries, while the looting that reached most archaeological sites in Costa Rica passed them by.

Each site adds something of its own. Finca 6 holds the only spheres still in linear arrangements, Batambal is the one settlement visible from a long way off, the largest sphere found so far lies at El Silencio, and Grijalba-2 uses limestone and was a subordinate centre. When the property was inscribed, Finca 6 was the only one of the four open to the public, and the management plan of February 2014 set out to open the other three. Finca 6 also keeps spheres confiscated after earlier looting, whose original positions are mostly unknown, and UNESCO asked for them to be marked as moved.

San José keeps the rest of the record under roofs. The National Museum covers the Indigenous past and the political history, the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum belongs to the Central Bank, the Jade Museum to the national insurance institute, and Britannica singles out the National Theatre for its architecture. Cartago holds the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles and, nearby, the colonial church at Orosi, the ruins at Ujarrás and the Lankester Botanical Garden, while the Guayabo archaeological site lies outside Turrialba. Sarchí, in Alajuela, is where the painted oxcarts are sold, the craft UNESCO proclaimed in 2005 and inscribed in 2008; Costa Rica: culture explains why each one was built to ring its own note.

The festival calendar sits mostly in the dry months. The Fiestas de Zapote in San José, a rodeo with fairground rides, street food and dancing, run at the end of December, and the Fiestas de Palmares, with rodeos and horse parades, in January. The Boruca stage their Juego de los Diablitos in December and the people of Rey Curré theirs in January, staged battles between the devils and the bulls that commemorate resistance to the Spanish conquerors. The Carnival of Limón falls in the second full week of October, in the Caribbean coast's relatively dry spell.

How visitors cross Costa Rica by road

Distances are short and roads are slow. The country is about 120 kilometres across at its narrowest, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, and its road system runs to more than 30,000 kilometres, much of it in disrepair. The main cities of the Valle Central are joined to both coasts by paved all-weather roads, and the Pan-American Highway runs through to Nicaragua in the north and Panama in the south. An OECD report of August 2016 summed up the network as extensive and of poor quality, with railways in disrepair and only slowly being reactivated after they were shut down in the 1990s, and internal transport relying heavily on private vehicles.

That leaves visitors on the road. Driving is on the right and the vehicle code is CR. The railway, out of service for several years, has been reactivated for city transport, and the crater roads up Irazú and Poás are among the paved routes a visitor is likely to use.

Visitors say as much. The Wikipedia account of tourism records the poor condition of the roads as the main complaint visitors make, and the World Economic Forum's competitiveness report of 2017 named ground and port infrastructure, with road quality and ground transport efficiency inside it, among the country's main weaknesses, alongside price competitiveness.

What arriving visitors need to know in Costa Rica

The currency is the Costa Rican colón, written with the sign ₡. The country keeps one time zone, six hours behind Coordinated Universal Time, and does not change its clocks in summer. The international calling code is +506. Power is 120 volts on the North American plugs, NEMA 1-15 and NEMA 5-15, the same standard used in the United States and Canada.

Entry rules depend on the passport. The British government's advice, as read in October 2026, allows British visitors up to 180 days without a visa under a tourist waiver, with the exact period set by the immigration officer on arrival, and warns that overstaying can bring a fine for each month and a refusal of later entry. A yellow fever vaccination certificate is required of anyone arriving from a country listed as a transmission risk. Taking wildlife out of the country, seashells included, can be fined, and cash or goods worth 10,000 US dollars or more must be declared on arrival to avoid seizure on departure.

Spanish is the language of the country. English is widely spoken, mainly because of the tourism industry, and in Limón province the descendants of Africans, most of them of Jamaican workers brought to build the Atlantic railway, speak Limonese Creole as well as Spanish. The greeting a visitor hears first is pura vida, pure life, used as hello, as a question about how things are going and as the answer to it.