Arenal Volcano National Park

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. For more than four decades it erupted almost continuously, sending lava down its slopes and glowing blocks tumbling through the night, one of the longest eruptions recorded anywhere since the eighteenth century. The activity ended in December 2010, and the volcano has been quiet since. The national park, created in 1991, protects the cone and the land around it.

What remains is one of the most perfectly shaped volcanoes on the planet. Arenal is a young stratovolcano, around 7,000 years old, the youngest in Costa Rica, and it rises to 1,633 metres in a near-symmetrical cone with a summit crater about 140 metres across. Seen from the lowlands of San Carlos, with cloud catching on the summit and rainforest climbing its lower slopes, it has the textbook silhouette that children draw when they draw a volcano. Its older neighbour, Cerro Chato, has been dormant for around 3,500 years; its crater holds a green lagoon hidden in forest.

The park is also a living demonstration of how quickly the tropics heal. Trails cross lava flows from the decades of eruption, some still bare and blocky, others already furred with mosses, ferns and young trees, alongside forest the lava never reached. The park spans several of Costa Rica's life zones, and its forests are home to a remarkable variety of birds, including the resplendent quetzal, as well as white-faced capuchin monkeys, coatis and deer. To the west lies Lake Arenal, the reservoir behind the country's largest hydroelectric dam, and the view of the cone across the water is one of the classic sights of Central America. The heat that once drove the eruption still warms the ground, feeding the hot springs around the foot of the mountain.

Getting there

The small town of La Fortuna, about 15 km from the volcano, is the usual base; the city of Quesada (Ciudad Quesada) is about 33 km away. La Fortuna Arenal Airport (FON) lies about 14 km from the park. San José, the capital, is about 90 km from the volcano as the crow flies, and most visitors arrive by road.