8-Day Costa Rica Nature Tour with Volcanoes, Wetlands and Beaches

Fly into San José, where our team meets you for the short transfer to a boutique hotel in the leafy highlands of the Central Valley. Depending on your landing time, the afternoon offers a gentle first taste: the gold pre-Columbian treasures downtown, or simply coffee on a verandah at altitude, where the air is spring-cool year-round. A welcome dinner of Costa Rican classics opens the expedition; the volcanoes start tomorrow.

Up early to beat the clouds to Poás, where a short trail through elfin cloud forest ends at the rim of a vast active crater and its impossibly turquoise acid lake. Back below the mist line, the morning continues on a working highland coffee farm, from cherry to cup with the people who grow it, ending in the best espresso of the trip. The afternoon descends north through rainforest to La Fortuna, where Arenal's perfect cone owns the horizon. The evening sets the pattern for volcano country: a long soak in spring-fed hot pools under the palms.

North across the plains to the Nicaraguan frontier, where the Río Frío slides slow and dark through the Caño Negro wetlands, one of the richest wildlife refuges in Central America. From a covered boat, the morning fills fast: caimans hauled out on the mud, howler monkeys roaring in the gallery forest, sloths curled in the crowns, basilisk lizards sprinting across the water on their hind legs, and kingfishers, spoonbills, and storks working the shallows. Lunch at a country restaurant on the way back, then a Fortuna afternoon at your pace: the waterfall plunge pool, the chocolate makers, or the hot springs again (no one has ever regretted the hot springs again).

The morning walks the famous hanging bridges: suspension walkways strung through the rainforest canopy, toucans and howlers at eye level, the volcano filling the gaps between the trees. Then the road curls around Lake Arenal, with wind farms on the ridgelines and the cloud forest of the Tilarán mountains giving way, kilometre by kilometre, to the golden dry forest of Guanacaste, cattle country, roadside fruit stands, and a stop at a village workshop where Chorotega-style pottery is still turned and fired the pre-Columbian way. By late afternoon you are at the Pacific: two nights at a beach resort on the gold coast, sunset included nightly.

A deliberate pause at the midpoint. The whole day belongs to the Pacific: swim the warm bay, take a morning surf lesson, ride into the dry forest, snorkel from a catamaran, or claim a palm and defend it until sunset. Guanacaste is Costa Rica's sunniest, driest province, and its beach culture - sabanero cattle country meeting the sea - moves at exactly the speed of a hammock. Your guide has the full menu of options; none of them are obligatory. Pura vida is a practice, and this is the practice day.

The expedition turns south down the coast road, the dry gold of Guanacaste greening by the hour into central-Pacific rainforest. At the Tárcoles River, a boat eases out among some of the largest American crocodiles in the world, five-metre animals basking on the banks with the insolence of creatures that have outlasted everything. Nearby, a macaw sanctuary tells the comeback story of the scarlet macaw on this coast, pairs of which now flash red and blue along the shore road as commonly as pigeons. By evening: Manuel Antonio, where the hotels sit in the forest and the capuchins inspect the balconies.

The country's smallest park delivers its biggest morning. With a naturalist and a spotting scope, the trail through the coastal rainforest becomes a treasure hunt: two-toed and three-toed sloths, capuchin troops, coatis, agoutis, toucans, and, with luck, the shy squirrel monkeys found only on this coast. The trail ends where the forest does: on Playa Manuel Antonio, a white crescent inside the park where you swim beneath the trees you have just walked through. The afternoon is free for the beach, the farewell dinner is high over the Pacific, and the sunset does the closing speech.

A last forest breakfast (listen for the macaws), then the scenic run back up to San José through the coastal hills and the Central Valley, arriving in good time for afternoon and evening departures. Connections are easy if you want more: we are glad to extend with Tortuguero's canals, the Osa Peninsula's deep wilderness, or a lazy landing week on either coast.