Carara National Park

Carara National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Carara is a small park on the Pacific coast road of Costa Rica, an hour and a half from San José and half an hour north of the surf town of Jacó, and it is one of the country's best places for birds and the easiest of its rainforests to visit, flat, close to the highway and partly wheelchair-accessible. The entrance fee is bought online through the national parks' booking system or at the gate, and the tours are chiefly a matter of adding a naturalist guide with a telescope, which is money well spent here, since the forest is tall and dim and an untrained eye walks past trogons, motmots, roosting owls and sleeping sloths: the guides gather at the entrance and can be hired on the spot, and the day tours from San José and the half-days from Jacó, Herradura, Punta Leona and the Puntarenas and Caldera cruise-ship piers include one.

Nearly all of them pair the park with the other sight of the district, the Tárcoles river, either a halt on the highway bridge just north of the entrance, from which twenty or thirty enormous American crocodiles can be seen basking on the mud below, or a two-hour boat safari through the river mouth and mangroves, which is excellent for herons, spoonbills, kingfishers, ospreys and the macaws' evening flight; avoid the boats whose crews feed the crocodiles by hand. Some tours end on a beach. The Carara adventure park with zip lines nearby is a private business. Bring repellent, since Carara is wetter and buggier than the parks further north.

Visiting Carara National Park: what you will see

Carara was protected as a biological reserve in 1978, on land taken from a vast cattle hacienda, and was upgraded to a national park in 1998 because so many people were coming; it covers about 52 square kilometres on the south bank of the Río Grande de Tárcoles, and its importance is its position, at the meeting point of the dry forests of the north Pacific and the wet rainforests of the south, so that species of both occur together and the bird list exceeds four hundred. It is the stronghold, with the Osa peninsula, of the scarlet macaw in Costa Rica: some 450 birds, recovered from a few dozen pairs through nest protection and artificial nest boxes, feed in the park's forest by day and fly out at dusk, in shrieking pairs and families, to roost in the coastal mangroves, returning at dawn, a spectacle best watched from the Tárcoles bridge or the river mouth.

The universal-access trail, a paved loop of 1.2 kilometres from the ranger station, leads into primary forest of giant espavel, ceiba and fig trees, and the Quebrada Bonita and Araceas loops continue through it; the Laguna Meándrica trail, entered from the highway to the north, follows the river to an oxbow lagoon with crocodiles, boat-billed herons, jacanas and anhingas, and floods in the rainy season. White-faced capuchins, howler monkeys, agoutis, coatis, white-tailed deer, collared peccaries, two- and three-toed sloths, armadillos, poison-dart frogs, basilisks and ctenosaurs are commonly seen, and ocelots and the odd puma leave tracks. Royal flycatchers, orange-collared manakins displaying at their leks, antbirds following army ants, several trogons and the turquoise-browed motmot are the birders' prizes. The name is said to mean river of lizards in the Huetar language, and pre-Columbian burial sites lie within the park.

Carara National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from 7 am to 4 pm in the dry season and from 8 am in the rains. December to April is drier, with easier walking and lower rivers, and is the macaws' nesting season; from May to November it rains most afternoons, the forest is at its most lush, mosquitoes are abundant and the lagoon trail is often closed by flooding.

Whatever the month, arrive at opening: the birds are active until about nine, the heat and humidity build quickly, and the tour buses arrive mid-morning. The macaws cross the river mouth at about 5 pm. Allow three hours for the trails, a full day with the river boat. Jacó is half an hour south, Manuel Antonio two hours, and San José an hour and a half by the Caldera highway.