Cocos Island
Interesting facts
- Cocos is the only piece of land above sea level on the entire Cocos tectonic plate.
- Counting oceanic islands, it is the southernmost point of geopolitical North America.
- German adventurer August Gissler spent most of 1889 to 1908 digging for treasure here and found only a handful of gold coins.
- 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.
- In 1863 a ship marooned 426 Tongan former slaves sick with smallpox on the island; a month later only 38 were found alive.
- The island's park rangers, numbering 33 at the time, were allowed to vote in a Costa Rican election for the first time in 2006.
- Jacques Cousteau visited the island several times and in 1994 named it the most beautiful island in the world.
- Of the island's 235 known flowering plants, 70 grow nowhere else, and about 65 of its more than 400 insect species are endemic.
- Thor Heyerdahl argued that the extensive coconut groves seen by early visitors were planted by pre-Columbian seafarers, though no archaeological evidence confirms it.
- Antarctic explorer Aeneas Mackintosh led an unsuccessful treasure-hunting expedition to Cocos in 1910.
Why it is worth it
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. It covers under 24 square kilometres and climbs to 575 metres at Cerro Iglesias, and it is one of the wettest places on the ocean's eastern side: more than 7,000 mm of rain a year fall on it, feeding a dense cloud forest and a coastline laced with waterfalls, over two hundred of them, many dropping straight off the cliffs into the sea.
Its isolation has made it a laboratory of evolution. Three land birds live nowhere else on Earth, the Cocos cuckoo, the Cocos flycatcher and the Cocos finch, the last a relative of Darwin's finches of the Galápagos. Beneath the water the island is even more famous. The seamounts and pinnacles around it draw the largest schools of hammerhead sharks reported anywhere in the world, along with a crowd of other big ocean fish. Costa Rica declared the island a national park in 1978, and in 1997 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; it is regularly counted among the finest dive sites in the world.
Cocos has an older reputation as a treasure island. Its best-known legend is the Treasure of Lima: church valuables, including life-size gold statues of the Virgin and Child, said to have been stolen in 1820 by the captain of the ship Mary Dear and buried on Cocos. Hundreds of treasure hunters have since come to dig for it; the hoard has never been found, and the stories are best taken as part of the island's romance.
Visitors see it as the sailors did: an emerald wall appearing out of the swell after a day and a half at sea, clouds snagged on the ridges and white threads of water falling into the coves. Landings are limited to the two sheltered anchorages, Chatham Bay and Wafer Bay, where the ranger stations stand and short trails lead into the forest.
Getting there
Cocos Island belongs to the Costa Rican province of Puntarenas and lies about 550 km from the mainland; the nearest mainland towns and airports, such as Nicoya and Nosara (NOB), are more than 500 km away, and the island has no airstrip. The island can only be reached by sea: diving liveaboards leave from the port of Puntarenas, and the crossing takes roughly 32 to 36 hours each way. Visits are arranged through licensed operators under national park rules.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Cocos Island is a volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean administered by Costa Rica, approximately 550 km southwest of the Costa Rican mainland. It constitutes the 11th of the 15 districts of Puntarenas Canton of the Province of Puntarenas. With an area of approximately 23.85 km2 (9.21 sq mi), the island is roughly rectangular in shape. It is the southernmost point of geopolitical North America if non-continental islands are included, and the only landmass above water on the Cocos tectonic plate.
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