Just a few hours away from Costa Rica's capital city is Puntarenas, harboring the closest beaches to San Jose. This area is unique in the balance of natural attractions with a wide variety of resort hotels and nature lodges. Great surfing, deep sea fishing (best here between Dec thru April), sea kayaking, canopy tours, bird watching, dolphin watching and revealing nature hikes are just a few of the worthwhile activities available from Puntarenas.

Being Costa Rica's largest province, Puntarenas includes practically all of the climate regimes found in this small, but tremendously varied, country. From tropical dry forest to rain forest, and from mangrove swamp to cloud forest to subalpine paramo, this sprawling province contains at least a little bit of everything.

Although the entire province lies on the Pacific side of the continental divide, much of its land area is not as severely affected by the annual dry season as is most of Guanacaste province (just to the north on the same side of the country). This is due to the topography's effect on the prevailing winds.

In the interior sections of the province that reach up to the ridgeline, luxuriant cloud forests exist owing to the mists that sweep across the mountaintops when the tradewinds' full effect is felt from December through February. 

The peculiar shape of Puntarenas province has a very sensible explanation. During the first 350 years of Spanish presence in Central America, the southern Pacific portion of what is now Costa Rica remained quite isolated from the developing population centers of the region. The high mountains between this area and the Central Valley presented a formidable barrier to the available means of terrestrial transportation. Thus, the few early settlers that ventured into the southern region came either from Panama to the south, or by boat from the port of Caldera in the Gulf of Nicoya.

The dimensions of the province are due to the fact that it includes all the many miles of coastline from the Gulf of Nicoya south to Panama, the large inland valleys of Coto Brus and El General, and the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula -- all areas that were once most easily approached by sea.