Costa Rica

Costa Rica's adventure capital sits at the foot of Arenal — a near-perfect 1,633m volcanic cone, dormant since 2010 but still feeding the area's many hot springs. La Fortuna Waterfall plunges 75m into a swimmable pool; Mistico's hanging bridges thread the rainforest canopy; Río Celeste's impossibly turquoise water sits a day-trip away. Zip-lining, rafting, sloth-spotting, and the famous Jeep-Boat-Jeep crossing to Monteverde all start here. Pura Vida personified.

Manuel Antonio packs Costa Rica's most photogenic combination into a tiny coastal sliver: a 1,983-hectare national park where white-sand crescents meet primary rainforest, and squirrel monkeys, sloths, and white-faced capuchins routinely cross the trail in front of you. The park sits at the foot of a steep ridge climbing up from Quepos, and the strip of road between has become Costa Rica's most concentrated tourism corridor — luxury jungle lodges, sea-view restaurants, and zip-line operators stacked along three switchbacked kilometres. Pura vida arrives with monkeys raiding your beach bag.

Monteverde sits at 1,330 metres on the Tilarán mountain ridge, where Pacific and Caribbean trade winds collide to create one of the wettest, mistiest, most biologically rich cloud forests on Earth. The town began in 1951 when a group of Alabama Quakers fleeing the U.S. draft bought land here for dairy farming, and accidentally protected the forest above their fields — now the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, with 500+ orchid species and the resplendent quetzal as its mascot. The dirt road in is famously rough, the gondola-and-cable canopy tours were invented here, and Santa Elena village still feels like a frontier outpost.

Tamarindo is the unofficial capital of Costa Rica's Pacific surf coast — a former fishing village transformed by The Endless Summer II in 1994 into a 7,000-person beach town stacked with surf schools, smoothie bars, and sunset-bar circuits. Playa Tamarindo's mile-long beach break works for total beginners; the more powerful Playa Grande across the estuary is the protected nesting beach for endangered leatherback turtles in Las Baulas National Marine Park. The Liberia airport (LIR) is just 75 km north, putting Tamarindo within five hours of Miami and making it the easiest beach landing in the country.