Trip Overview
Five Percent of All Species on Earth. Most Visitors See a Fraction of It.
The Pacuare River moves fast and cold through a canyon so dense with jungle that the canopy closes overhead and the light arrives in pieces. Pacuare Lodge sits in the middle of this, twenty bungalows in a 340-hectare protected area that has no road connecting it to the outside world. You arrive by white water raft or helicopter. If you choose the raft, the river delivers you through a sequence of rapids and then deposits you at the lodge in a state of mild exhilaration, the trees pressing in on both sides, the sound of the water replaced by the layered, specific sound of a functioning rainforest at full capacity. Stand on the terrace and listen to what the jungle actually sounds like when nothing paved connects it to anything, and the category of experience announces itself immediately. Pacuare Lodge is in the jungle. Not near it.
Costa Rica is a country that has made a deliberate national decision to protect what it has. In 1948, it abolished its army and redirected the military budget into education and conservation. Today a quarter of the country is protected national park or biological reserve. The scarlet macaws you watch fly in pairs above the Osa Peninsula exist because of that decision. The jaguar tracks on the riverbank at Corcovado at dawn exist because of that decision. The humpback whales gathering offshore at Marino Ballena in the largest aggregation in the world exist because of that decision. Walking through Corcovado National Park at first light with a private naturalist who reads tracks and silences the way other people read maps, you understand that this is not incidental wildlife. This is what a country looks like when it has protected something seriously for a very long time.
Arenal Volcano rises 1,633 metres from the surrounding lowland forest and on clear mornings it is simply one of the most dramatic things you will look at over breakfast. Nayara Springs sits on its flank, an adults-only Relais & Châteaux property of 35 private villas, each with its own plunge pool fed by geothermal springs from the volcano beneath. The water arrives at exactly the temperature at which your body stops noticing it, and the jungle operates at full volume around you, the sloths in the trees above unhurried by any of it. They were not placed there. They simply live there, as they have for longer than any hotel has existed.
The Osa Peninsula is what National Geographic has called the most biologically intense place on earth. Lapa Rios Lodge commands a ridge above 1,000 acres of private rainforest reserve at the point where the Golfo Dulce meets the Pacific, and the 300-plus bird species that move through it every day include the scarlet macaws the lodge is named after. Further up the southern Pacific coast, Kura Design Villas perches above Uvita on a jungle-covered ridge with eight suites, an infinity pool that appears to dissolve into the ocean, and direct views over Marino Ballena National Park, where the beach below forms a natural tombolo at low tide in the exact shape of a whale's tail. The coast, like everything else here, is simply being itself.
