Arenal

Arenal Volcano is the centrepiece of everything — a nearly perfect cone rising from the jungle floor that dominates every view and conversation in the region. The volcano went dormant in 2010, but the hot springs it feeds are very much alive. We soaked in thermal pools heated by volcanic activity while the cone disappeared and reappeared through clouds above us, and the combination of hot water, cold beer, and geological drama was close to perfection.

Coming from Puerto Escondido, where the Pacific is flat and wide and horizontal, encountering Arenal’s verticality was a jolt. The volcano is 1,670 metres of symmetry that looks like a child’s drawing of what a volcano should be. From 1968 until 2010, it was one of the most active volcanoes in the world — glowing lava flows visible at night, eruptions that sent boulders the size of cars rolling down its flanks. The 1968 eruption destroyed three villages and killed 87 people, and the 1968 lava trail we hiked passes through the hardened flows from that event, now slowly being reclaimed by pioneer plants and young forest.

The hot springs deserve their own category of praise. Tabacon Hot Springs is the most famous — a series of thermal rivers and pools cascading through landscaped gardens at the base of the volcano. The water emerges from the ground at temperatures that would scald and is cooled by the time it reaches the swimming pools to a temperature that makes your bones dissolve. We went at night, steam rising around us, the volcano a dark shape above, the stars visible through gaps in the cloud. Baldi Hot Springs offers a more local, less curated experience — water slides, swim-up bars, and Costa Rican families treating volcanic geothermal activity as a perfectly normal Tuesday evening.

The hanging bridges walk through the rainforest canopy offered wildlife — howler monkeys, toucans, and a sloth moving so slowly we almost missed it. The Arenal Hanging Bridges park runs sixteen bridges through the forest, some of them at canopy level, and the perspective transforms the jungle from a wall of green into a layered ecosystem where each level — forest floor, understorey, canopy, emergent — operates as its own neighbourhood.

La Fortuna waterfall plunged seventy metres into a pool where we swam in water cold enough to gasp. The adventure options are endless — zip-lining, white-water rafting on the Balsa River, kayaking on Lake Arenal where the wind is strong enough to sustain a windsurfing scene. But the hot springs at sunset remained our favourite. There is something deeply correct about sitting in naturally heated water while a volcano looms above you — a reminder that the earth is alive beneath our feet, that the heat we are enjoying is the same force that built the mountains around us.

When to go: December through April is dry season with the best chance of clear volcano views. February and March are driest. Green season brings rain but lush landscapes and lower prices. Mornings are typically clearer than afternoons year-round. The hot springs are perfect in any weather.