Sea Turtles

Six of the world's eight species of marine turtles nest on Costa Rica's beaches, and you can see turtles laying eggs somewhere in Costa Rica virtually anytime of year. In "season," turtles can vastly outnumber tourists.

Tortuguero National Park, in northeastern Costa Rica, is one of fewer than 30 places in the world that the green turtle considers clean enough and safe enough to lay its eggs. Although green turtles were once abundant throughout the Caribbean, today there are only three important sites in the region where they nest: one on Aves Island, 62 kilometers (39 miles) west of Montserrat; a second at Gandoca-Manzanillo (and occasionally on beaches north toward Cahuita); and another at Tortuguero, the only major nesting site in the western Caribbean. From June to November, peaking in August and September, 5,000 greens swim from their feeding grounds as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and Venezuela to lay their eggs at the eons-old nesting site on the oceanside stretch of beach on Tortuguero's barrier island.

On the Pacific coast, the most spectacular nestings are at Playa Nancite in Santa Rosa National Park, and Ostional Wildlife Refuge, where tens of thousands of olive ridley turtles come ashore from July through December in synchronized mass nestings known as arribadas. Giant leatherback turtles (the world's largest reptiles, weighing as much as a ton and reaching a length of 3 meters/9 feet) nest at Playa Grande, near Tamarindo, in April. Hawksbills, ridleys, leatherbacks, Pacific greens, and occasionally loggerheads (primarily Caribbean nesters) appear in lesser numbers at other beaches along the Pacific coast.