Costa Rica Family Travel Guide

Look for the CST rating, then look past it. The Certificado de Sostenibilidad Turistica is the government scheme and it runs one to five leaves. Five leaves is a real hurdle. Three leaves is not. Anyone can print a leaf logo on their own website, so check the property on the official register rather than taking the badge at face value.

Ask one question: how much land do you protect, and since when? A real lodge answers instantly and in hectares, with a date. A greenwashed one talks about LED bulbs and locally sourced breakfast. The good ones are usually family owned, usually thirty or forty years old, and usually have a biologist on staff rather than an activities coordinator.

Community owned beats foreign owned. A great deal of Guanacaste is owned by international hotel groups and the money leaves. The lodges around Sarapiqui, the Osa and the Caribbean side are far more often locally held, and your guide is usually somebody who grew up in that forest.

Say no to anything you can hold. Sloth selfies, monkeys on shoulders, drugged wildlife by the roadside. It is illegal in Costa Rica and it still happens where tourists pay for it. A real rescue center will not let you touch anything and will tell you which animals are going back out.

Add fifty per cent to whatever the app says. Mountain roads, single lane bridges you have to line for, roadworks, fog on the passes above Cartago, and lorries that cannot climb. Arenal to Monteverde is about seventy five miles and takes three and a half hours, or ninety minutes if you take the jeep boat jeep across the lake, which is the right answer.

Book a 4×4 if you are going anywhere unpaved. Monteverde, the Osa, Nosara and most of the good lodges sit at the end of a dirt road with a river crossing in it. A standard hire car will physically not get there in the green season and your insurance will not cover the attempt.

Do not drive at night. No street lighting, no verges, livestock, cyclists with no lights and potholes you will not see. Be where you are sleeping before dark, which is about half past five all year because the country sits near the equator.

Domestic flights are cheap enough to be worth it. Sansa flies out of San Jose to Drake Bay, Tortuguero, Nosara and Puerto Jimenez in twenty five minutes for what a shuttle costs. If your trip includes the Osa, fly. Six hours of road each way with children is a poor trade.

Hire the guide. Every time. This is the one piece of advice I would fight anybody about. A family walking Manuel Antonio alone sees trees. The same family behind a guide with a spotting scope sees sloths, a viper coiled on a branch a meter from the path, bats under a leaf and three species of monkey. Twenty five dollars a head and it changes the entire trip.

Go at dawn, not at ten. Animals are active early and again at dusk, and asleep in between. Park gates open at seven. The families who turn up mid morning and leave disappointed are the ones who slept in.

Night walks are the best thing you will do. Red eyed tree frogs, kinkajous, tarantulas, sleeping birds at eye level. Most lodges run one. Children who are bored by scenery are rarely bored by a torch and a frog.

Do not feed the monkeys, and shut your door. White faced capuchins will take food out of a bag and out of a hand and they bite. Feeding them makes them aggressive and sick, and half the beach signs in Manuel Antonio exist because people did it anyway.

No army since 1948. Costa Rica abolished its military and redirected the budget toward education and healthcare. It is one of the most stable, literate countries in the region because of that choice.

The ecotourism reputation is actually earned. About a quarter of the country is protected land. This is not greenwashing, it is a genuine national priority that predates the tourism industry built around it.

Sea turtles nest on both coasts. Tortuguero on the Caribbean side is one of the most important nesting grounds in the hemisphere. Time a visit right and you can watch it happen.

Gallo pinto is breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rice and beans, done well, appears at almost every meal. It sounds simple and it is good.

Hire car or private shuttle, and it is a real decision. A car gives you the sodas, the roadside fruit stands and the ability to stop when somebody spots a sloth. A shuttle means nobody is driving those roads tired with three children in the back. If you are doing three regions in ten days, I usually put families in shuttles between bases and a car locally.

Understand the car hire insurance before you land. Costa Rica requires a mandatory third party liability policy that is almost never included in the price you were quoted online. A forty dollar a day car becomes ninety at the desk. It is not a scam, it is the law, but it is the number one complaint I hear.

Shared shuttles are cheap and civilised. Interbus and Grayline run air conditioned minibuses between every tourist town on a fixed timetable, hotel door to hotel door, for around sixty dollars a person. For two adults and three children it is often the same as a car once you add the insurance.

Fly into Liberia if the beach is the point. Liberia serves Guanacaste and saves four hours of driving compared with San Jose. San Jose is right for Arenal, the Caribbean and anything in the middle. Booking the wrong airport costs a day at each end.

Colones and dollars both work, colones are better. Dollars are accepted almost everywhere and the exchange rate you get is poor. Pay in colones where you can, and always decline the offer to charge your card in dollars.

Budget more than you think. Costa Rica is the most expensive country in Central America. A good family lodge runs two to four hundred dollars a night, guided walks are twenty five to sixty a head, and park entry is worth it but adds up. It is closer to a European budget than a Mexican one.

Tap water is fine in most of the country. Drinkable in San Jose, the Central Valley and the main tourist areas. Bottled on the Caribbean coast, the Osa and anywhere remote. Ask at the lodge, they will tell you.

Healthcare is good and the mosquitoes are the real issue. Private clinics are excellent. Dengue is present year round and there is no vaccine you will be offered, so repellent with DEET or picaridin, long sleeves at dusk and a fan or net over the beds is the actual defense.

Pick two or three regions, not five. Arenal, Monteverde and a Pacific beach town is a full, well paced ten day trip. Trying to add Tortuguero and the Osa Peninsula on top of that means spending your whole trip in the car.

Budget real time for mountain roads. A drive that looks like two hours on a map can take four in the rainy season. Build slack into every travel day.

Consider a domestic flight for the far regions. The Osa Peninsula and Tortuguero are both much faster by small plane than by road. It costs more but buys back a full day.

Know which season you are booking. The Pacific and Caribbean coasts have different rainy seasons. Check both before you assume you know the weather.

The classic ten days, and it works. Arenal for three nights, Monteverde for two, and the Pacific coast at Manuel Antonio for four, with the last night near the airport. Volcano, cloud forest, beach. Nobody has ever come back from that unhappy.

The better ten days, if they are older than eight. Sarapiqui or Arenal for three, then fly to the Osa Peninsula for four or five. Corcovado is the most biologically intense place in the country by a wide margin and it is where the serious wildlife is. It costs more and it is worth it.

The Caribbean side is a different country. Puerto Viejo and Cahuita are Afro Caribbean, the food is coconut and jerk rather than rice and beans, and the pace is slower. It rains on a different schedule from the Pacific side, so September and October are actually good there while the rest of the country is drowning.

Two weeks buys you a fourth region. Not ten days. If you have fourteen nights, add Tortuguero for the turtles or the Nicoya coast for the surf. Under fourteen, take something off the list instead.

Arenal. Three nights. The volcano, the hot springs, hanging bridges, a night walk for frogs. We stayed at the base in 2008 and I still send families there.

Manuel Antonio. Three nights. The park with sloths and monkeys, the beach inside it, a hotel with a pool above the sea.

Monteverde. Two nights. The cloud forest, zip lines through the canopy, the night hike. Cooler and misty.

Guanacaste. Four nights for a beach week. Tamarindo for surf lessons, the Papagayo peninsula for resorts, dry season sun.

Tortuguero. Two nights. Canals by boat, turtles nesting July to October, no cars. A jungle Venice.

Give them a job. A cheap pair of binoculars and a checklist of ten animals turns a walk from something they endure into something they are running. This is the single best thing I tell families about Costa Rica and it costs fifteen dollars.

Respect the Pacific rip currents. Costa Rica has serious rips and very few lifeguards. Manuel Antonio’s main beach is patrolled and calm. A lot of the Guanacaste and Nicoya beaches are not. Ask at the hotel which end of the beach is safe today rather than assuming.

Age eight is roughly the line. Under eight, do Arenal and a beach and keep the drives short. Over eight, the hanging bridges, the night walks and Corcovado all open up and the trip becomes a much better one. Zip lines usually start around five with a guide riding tandem.

Everywhere feeds children happily. Rice, beans, plantain, chicken and fruit is the default and none of it is spicy. Costa Rica is one of the easiest countries in the world for a fussy eater, which is not something you can say about much of Latin America.

A private naturalist guide for wildlife. A good guide finds ten times what you will spot walking alone. This is the single highest value splurge in the whole country.

One night in an eco-lodge with real canopy views. Waking up inside the rainforest, rather than driving in for a day tour, changes the whole experience.

A proper hot springs resort near Arenal. There is a wide range here, and the nicer properties are worth the upgrade after a day of hiking or rafting.

A domestic flight to skip a brutal drive. To Tortuguero or the Osa Peninsula especially, this buys back a full travel day for a family trip.

How long everything took. San Jose to Dominical looked like a morning on the map. It was most of a day, most of it bumpy, and it is the single thing I would change about that trip.

That the best place we stayed was the roughest. The Bella Vista Lodge was not modern and it was not spotless. It was high up with a view and a hammock and an owner who put us on horses. The resort at the end cost more and I remember almost nothing about it.

That it is expensive. We went expecting Central American prices. Costa Rica is not that, and it has got further from it since. Families should budget for something closer to a European trip.

How much you do not see without a guide. We walked plenty of trails on our own and saw green. I did not properly understand what we had missed until years later when I started sending clients out with naturalists.

Arenal. Three nights. The volcano, the hot springs, the hanging bridges, a night walk for frogs. We stayed at the base in 2008 and I still send families there.

Manuel Antonio. Three nights. Sloths and monkeys in the park, the beach inside it, a hotel with a pool above the sea.

Guanacaste. Four nights if you want a beach week instead. Tamarindo for surf lessons, the Papagayo peninsula for resorts, dry season sun.