The Most Beautiful Places in Costa Rica
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Costa Rica are Poás Volcano, Cocos Island and National Theatre of Costa Rica. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Costa Rica is a narrow bridge of land between the Pacific and the Caribbean, raised where the Cocos Plate slides beneath the Caribbean Plate. A chain of volcanoes runs down its spine, and rainfall from two oceans feeds cloud forest, rivers and hot springs on their slopes. A large share of the country is protected as national parks and reserves, so much of this volcanic landscape still lies under forest. Its towns are small and young, but the coffee wealth of the 19th century left at least one building of real grandeur.
Poás Volcano holds a wide active crater with an acidic, steaming lake, Laguna Caliente, while Arenal is a steep, nearly symmetrical cone that erupted almost continuously for decades after 1968. In Tenorio Volcano National Park, the Río Celeste runs a milky sky-blue where two clear streams meet and mix.
Far out in the Pacific, Cocos Island is a rainforest-covered island ringed by cliffs and waterfalls, famous for its hammerhead sharks and for old legends of buried pirate treasure. In San José, the National Theatre of Costa Rica, opened in 1897, brings marble staircases, gilded halls and painted ceilings in a European style to Central America, paid for by the country's coffee exports.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Poás Volcano | Volcano | |
| 2 | Cocos Island | Island | |
| 3 | National Theatre of Costa Rica | Theatre building | |
| 4 | Arenal Volcano National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Río Celeste, Tenorio Volcano National Park | National park |
01 Poás Volcano
Volcán Poás
Costa Rica · 19.7 km from Alajuela10.198° N 84.230° W
Peter Andersen · CC BY 2.5 Poás is a stratovolcano in Costa Rica's Cordillera Central, rising to 2,697 metres, and it offers one of the rare chances to stand at the rim of a living crater and look straight into it.
Did you know? Acid gases from the crater produce acid rain and fog, and the resulting belt of dead vegetation downwind is visible from space.
02 Cocos Island
Costa Rica5.528° N 87.061° W
The TerraMar Project · CC BY-SA 2.0 Cocos Island rises out of the open Pacific some 550 km off the coast of Costa Rica, a steep green block of volcanic rock with no permanent inhabitants except a small rotating team of park rangers.
Did you know? In 1795 George Vancouver had his ships' names and arrival date carved into a rock at Chatham Bay, and later captains added their own inscriptions.
03 National Theatre of Costa Rica
Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica
Costa Rica · 0.4 km from San José9.933° N 84.077° W
Mariordo ((Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 When San José had barely twenty thousand inhabitants, Costa Rica built itself an opera house fit for a European capital.
Did you know? The facade’s allegorical figures of Dance, Fame and Music were carved by Pietro Bulgarelli, while Adriático Froli sculpted Calderón and Beethoven.
04 Arenal Volcano National Park
Parque nacional Volcán Arenal
Costa Rica · 32.3 km from Quesada10.463° N 84.703° W
Image by InfiniteThought from Pixabay For most of recorded history Arenal looked like an ordinary forested hill. Then, on 29 July 1968, it blew apart. The eruption buried the villages of Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luis, killed more than seventy people, and from that day the mountain did not stop.
Did you know? The 1968 blasts opened three new craters on the western flank, of which only one survives today.
05 Río Celeste, Tenorio Volcano National Park
Parque Nacional Volcán Tenorio
Costa Rica · 28.4 km from Cañas10.667° N 85.000° W
Cephas · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few rivers anywhere look as improbable as the Río Celeste. Inside Tenorio Volcano National Park, on the slopes of the Guanacaste volcanic range in northern Costa Rica, an ordinary forest stream turns a milky sky-blue within a few metres, as if someone had poured paint into it.
Did you know? A tree frog discovered in the reserve next to the park was named Tlalocohyla celeste in 2022, partly in tribute to the river's turquoise water.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Costa Rica?
- On our list, Poás Volcano ranks first, followed by Cocos Island and National Theatre of Costa Rica.
- Why is Río Celeste blue?
- The river gets its colour where two clear streams meet. Minerals carried by one of them form fine particles when mixed with the other, and these scatter sunlight so that the water looks a bright sky-blue.
- Is Arenal Volcano still active?
- Arenal erupted violently in 1968 and then produced lava flows and explosions almost continuously until around 2010. Since then it has been in a resting phase, but it is still considered an active volcano.
- Who paid for the National Theatre of Costa Rica?
- The National Theatre in San José was financed largely by a tax on coffee exports, agreed by the country's coffee growers in the 1890s. It opened in 1897 and is regarded as the finest historic building in Costa Rica.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Costa Rica?
- In our collection, the places in Costa Rica are most often national parks (2), volcanoes (1), islands (1) and theatres (1).
- How many places are on this list in Costa Rica?
- The list covers 5 places.