Costa Rica: The Rough Guide (Costa Rica (Rough Guides), 2nd ed) (Paperback)

Though everyone passes through it, hardly anyone falls in love with San Jos, Costa Rica's capital city and transportation hub. Often dismissed as an ugly sprawl, lacking in metropolitan ambience, it is much underrated, with a stirring setting amid jagged mountain peaks, some excellent cafs and restaurants, leafy parks, a lively university district and a good arts scene. The surrounding Valle Central, agricultural heartland of the country, is generally seen in terms of a series of easy day trips from the capital. Most popular are the volcanos - the huge crater of Volcn Pos, bubbling and simmering, and largely dormant Volcn Iraz, a strange lunar landscape high above the regional capital of Cartago.

Founded as a dairy farming community by American Quaker settlers in the early 1950s, Monteverde has become the country's number-one tourist attraction. It's the community-founded Cloudforest Reserve that pulls in the visitors, who flock here to walk trails through some of the only remaining pristine cloudforest in the Americas. Of the many beaches, Manuel Antonio wins the popularity contest, with its picture-postcard perfect ocean setting. Others, particularly the Nicoya Peninsula beaches of Smara and Nosara, are equally pretty, and far less touristed. The steamy Caribbean coast holds few good swimming beaches, many of them plagued by strong currents and sharks. However, this is the side of the country where you're most likely to see the seasonal mass-nestings of formerly endangered giant sea turtles, at the isolated community of Tortuguero, linked by a series of lazy lagoons to the earthquake-battered port of Lim-n.

Though nowhere in the country is further than nine hours' drive from San Jos - it's the condition of the roads, rather than distance, that determine the length of any journey - the far north and the far south are less visited than other regions. The broad alluvial plains of the Zona Norte, stretching up to the Nicaraguan border at the R'o San Juan, are often overlooked, despite featuring active Volcn Arenal, which spouts and spews over the friendly tourist hangout of Fortuna, affording arresting nighttime scenes of blood-red lava illuminating the sky. It's in the north of the country, too, that you'll find some of Costa Rica's groundbreaking scientific research stations, including the tourist lodge and private rainforest reserve of Rara Avis and the La Selva biological station, both of which are superb destinations for birders and visitors with specialist interests in botany and the life of the rainforest. Off-the-beaten-path travellers and serious hikers will be happiest in the rugged Zona Sur, where you can climb to the highest point in the country, Mount Chirrip-, in the national park of the same name. Parque Nacional Corcovado, probably the best destination in the country for walkers, is tucked away in the extreme southwest, on the outstretched feeler of the Osa Peninsula. Protecting the last significant area of tropical wet forest on the Pacific coast of the isthmus, Corcovado is also one of the only places in the country where you have a fighting chance of seeing some of the wildlife for which the country is so famed. In the northwest, the cattle-ranching province of Guanacaste is often called "the home of Costa Rican folklore". It's difficult to find living and authentic examples of the folkloric tradition today, however, except perhaps in the traditional marimba music that you'll hear only at local fiestas and special occasions. Sabanero (cowboy) culture dominates here, with exuberant rag-tag rodeos, and large cattle haciendas set amid a deforested, but nonetheless affecting, landscape. The province's Parque Nacional Rinc-n de la Vieja is one of the prime hiking destinations in the country, a superb, fantastical place dotted with ethereal volcanic mudpots and steam holes.

Lim-n province, which borders the Caribbean coast, is the polar opposite to traditional ladino Guanacaste, with about thirty percent of its population descended from Afro-Caribbeans. Brought to Costa Rica at the end of the nineteenth century to work on the construction of the San Jos-Lim-n railroad (the "Jungle Train", which no longer runs), the Jamaicans brought their language (Creole English), their Protestantism and the West Indian traditions that remain relatively intact today. In the Talamancan region to the south live the last significant populations of Bribr' and Cabecar indigenous peoples, although you cannot in general visit their communities.

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