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Written by Nikki Solano

Nikki is the CEO of Pura Vida! eh? Inc. (Costa Rica Discounts), and the author of the guidebooks Moon Costa Rica (2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025 editions) and Moon Best of Costa Rica (2022 edition) from Moon Travel Guides. Together with her Costa Rican husband, Ricky, she operates the Costa Rica Travel Blog, created the online community DIY Costa Rica, built the Costa Rica Destination Tool, oversees the brand-new (summer 2023) Costa Rica Travel Shop, and designed the Costa Rica Trip Planning 101 E-Course. Also, Nikki wrote the Costa Rica cover feature for Wanderlust Magazine's sustainability-focused Travel Green List issue, showcased Costa Rica destinations and experiences on Rick Steves' Monday Night Travel show and podcast/radio show, and served as the Costa Rica Destination Editor for Essentialist, a luxury travel brand. Want to show your appreciation for her free article below? Thank Nikki here. ❤️️

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The powerful philosophy of busyness (groups and crowds) in Costa Rica

“Busy” is an incredibly subjective term. It’s also an incredibly powerful term because it has the ability to make or break Costa Rica travel plans, affecting the quality and subsequent enjoyment level of Costa Rica vacations.

For many travelers, Costa Rica destinations, national parks, adventure parks, beaches, and other places of interest that are deemed to be “busy” are a major turnoff; they get mislabeled as “crowded” or undesirable “tourist traps” and skipped over in favor of other “not busy” or “empty” places and experiences that are presumed to be “better.” But let’s ponder philosophically for a moment; what do the relative terms “busy” and “not busy” actually mean? Would a national park that receives 500 visitors a day be considered busy? How about a beach that has 50 people sprawled out on it—not busy? What if we told you that the national park or beach was notably small or exceptionally large geographically, affecting its population per square meter? If you’re a traveler who has visited some of the world’s most popular sites, where hundreds or thousands of people are known to gather, your answer would surely differ from that of a traveler who seeks solitude, and that’s okay. Some of us perceive situations differently than others and we can agree to disagree about how we define them. That’s why it’s important for every Costa Rica-bound traveler (yourself included) to take a moment and contemplate what busyness means to them. It’s a crucial step in building a Costa Rica trip that’s enjoyable, or in the very least, not disappointing.

Some Costa Rica resources make absolute, wide-reaching claims about Costa Rica being or not being busy. (Go ahead and ignore those claims; they’re unhelpful and you deserve far more insightful advice.) While the creators of those resources are entitled to their opinions, truly the only person who can decide whether a place or an experience is or isn’t busy, and subsequently, whether it is or isn’t desirable, is you. Fortunately, all you need to make that decision is information and photos that show what busyness (conceptualized as popularity) looks like in Costa Rica and how it changes according to the time of year that you visit, the places you go, the tours/activities that you experience, the time of day that you’re active, and the type(s) of transportation services that you use. With that knowledge, you can determine your comfort level and enjoyment level across varying degrees of popularity, then plan your vacation in a way that maximizes both.

We’d hate to see you automatically conform to other people’s beliefs, so when you wonder, “Is Costa Rica busy?”, we implore you to educate yourself with the information and photos that we’ve compiled for you below, especially if you’re the type of traveler who finds busyness particularly off-putting. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn how busyness presents in Costa Rica, and how (spoiler alert!) groups and crowds aren’t as big of an issue as you may think.

If you’d rather not read the entire article (it’s a long one!), feel free to make an appointment to communicate with me (Nikki) privately and we can explore the topic of Costa Rica being (or not being) busy in greater or more personalized detail. 🙂

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider some statistics.

The number of people that go to Costa Rica each year

According to the most recent data obtained by the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT; 2023), Costa Rica receives approximately 2.75 million international visitors per annum. To put that number into context, roughly 7 million people, 32 million people, and a whopping 58 million people visit the Eiffel Tower, the Caribbean region, and Disney World respectively each year. With its modest number of arrivals, Costa Rica plays a small albeit significant role on the worldwide tourism stage.

The behaviors of Costa Rica travelers

Other statistics from ICT show that Costa Rica visitors spread themselves out across all seven regions of the country and spend their time engaging in anywhere between one and forty-four activities at a variety of sites. Perhaps what’s more telling is that visitors don’t all flock to one or two main areas and sign up for the same experiences. Costa Rica’s tourism wealth is shared by several destinations (our Costa Rica Destination Tool alone counts 66 destinations) and is further divided between national parks, adventure parks, beaches, and other places of interest at those destinations, so despite being a nation that’s diminutive in size, Costa Rica, with its countrywide distribution of tourism, rarely feels full.

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider the time of year that you travel.

Costa Rica’s travel seasons

Our related blog post When To Go To Costa Rica According To Cost, Weather, Wildlife, And More outlines the pros and cons of visiting Costa Rica at different times of the year. (Please see that article if you need help deciding which month would be the best month to travel to Costa Rica depending on your priorities.) But in focusing solely on busyness, which is the purpose of this particular article, it’s helpful to know that of the four travel seasons that Costa Rica observes (the high season, the low season, the peak/holiday season, and the shoulder season), the peak/holiday season followed by the high season are the times of year when the greatest number travelers visit Costa Rica. (That is to say, they’re the most popular times of year to visit Costa Rica.) Here’s a quick breakdown of Costa Rica’s four travel seasons:

Tourism season	Degree of tourism	Timeline
High season	The high season receives the greatest number of foreign visitors	Mid-December to April
Low season	The low season receives the fewest number of foreign visitors	May to mid-December
Peak / Holiday season (a sub-season of the high season)	The peak/holiday season receives a surge of foreign visitors and represents the busiest part of the high season	Last two weeks of December to the first two weeks of January, as well as the week of Easter
Shoulder season (a sub-season of the low season)	The shoulder season receives a surge of foreign visitors and represents the busiest part of the low season	July (sometimes the end of June) to August

The busiest month(s) to travel to Costa Rica

The time of year that you decide to visit Costa Rica has a major impact on the number of travelers you’ll encounter during your trip. Consider the following report from ICT of international arrivals in Costa Rica broken down by month, which shows that the month with the greatest number of arrivals, December, is nearly two and a half times busier than the month with the fewest number of arrivals, September.

Month	Number of international arrivals to Costa Rica per year
January	272,444 (roughly 8,788 per day, on average)
February	278,296 (roughly 9,939 per day, on average)
March	293,555 (roughly 9,469 per day, on average)
April	236,611 (roughly 7,887 per day, on average)
May	187,399 (roughly 6,045 per day, on average)
June	221,152 (roughly 7,371 per day, on average)
July	244,967 (roughly 7,902 per day, on average)
August	196,233 (roughly 6,330 per day, on average)
September	131,828 (roughly 4,394 per day, on average)
October	149,548 (roughly 4,824 per day, on average)
November	231,498 (roughly 7,716 per day, on average)
December	307,603 (roughly 9,922 per day, on average)

To give you an idea of what the high season looks like in Costa Rica, please see the waterfall photos above and the beach photos below.

As we noted at the start of this article, “busy” is a subjective term. If you’re accustomed to spending time at Waikiki Beach in the US, Bondi Beach in Australia, Copacabana Beach in Brazil, or any other popular beach in the world, you’ll likely be amazed by the Costa Rica beach photos above, specifically how unoccupied the beaches look. But if you’re an off-the-beaten-path traveler or you want to feel like you’ve got a beach all to yourself in Costa Rica, you may be turned off by the above photographs, specifically the number of beachgoers you see. To all of you we kindly say, to each their own, and take what you will from our photographic evidence of eight of the most visited beaches in Costa Rica during busy times of the year. 🙂

To confirm, each of the eight beaches pictured above receives fewer travelers during the low season. Also, it’s worth mentioning that Costa Rica is home to many other, less popular beaches than the eight beaches pictured above. If you’d like to learn more about those beaches, don’t miss our related blog post 80+ Costa Rica Beaches (In Photos) And Where To Find Them. If you’d like to learn more about Costa Rica’s eco-friendly beaches, we have an article that covers that topic too: Award-Winning Blue Flag Beaches In Costa Rica (Photos & Map; Most-Recent Winners).

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider the destinations you want to visit.

The most visited regions of Costa Rica

The destinations that you decide to visit in Costa Rica (i.e., the cities, towns, villages, and communities) also have a major impact on the number of travelers you’ll encounter during your trip. In contemplating busyness, it pays to know which parts of Costa Rica receive the greatest number of visitors, so worth a look is the following statistical report (from ICT) of the geographical region(s) that Costa Rica travelers visit. It not only proves that travelers move between regions during their trip (that’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100%) but also that the Central Valley and Guanacaste regions are the most visited parts of Costa Rica (and unsurprisingly so, given that those two regions are home to Costa Rica’s two international airports.)

Geographical region	Percentage of travelers who visit the region during their trip
Central Valley (e.g., SJO Airport, San Jose, Alajuela, Heredia, Cartago, Turrialba)	43.1%
Guanacaste (e.g., LIR Airport, Liberia, Rincon de la Vieja, Papagayo, Playas del Coco, Playa Flamingo, Tamarindo, Nosara, Samara)	40.4%
Northern Inlands (e.g., La Fortuna/Arenal, Sarapiqui, Bijagua, Monteverde)	35.9%
Central Pacific (e.g., Jaco, Manuel Antonio, Dominical)	28.8%
Puntarenas (e.g., Santa Teresa, Mal Pais, Montezuma, Puntarenas)	27.1%
Caribbean (e.g., Limon, Tortuguero, Cahuita, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Manzanillo)	21.7%
Southern Pacific (e.g., Drake Bay, Puerto Jimenez, Golfito)	13.6%

The most visited cities, towns, villages, and communities in Costa Rica

The region-based statistics cited above are helpful in understanding which parts of Costa Rica are busier than others, but they’re not focused enough to point out which particular Costa Rica destinations receive the fewest and the most travelers. Unfortunately, ICT doesn’t have (or hasn’t released) statistics on those, but simply from working in Costa Rica’s tourism industry for nearly two decades, we can tell you how the 32 most visited tourist destinations in Costa Rica would be categorized according to their popularity. To clarify, the chart we created below categorizes Costa Rica destinations according to the popularity of the destination itself, not the popularity of a particular attraction at the destination, and only with respect to its popularity among international visitors, not its popularity among locals. It also considers the destination’s popularity on average throughout the year, not its popularity at a specific time of year, such as during the high season or the low season.

Popularity level among tourists	Destination
Very popular	La Fortuna/Arenal, Playas del Coco, Tamarindo, Nosara, Jaco, Manuel Antonio, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca
Between moderately popular and very popular	Monteverde, Papagayo, Playa Flamingo, Samara, Santa Teresa, Tortuguero
Moderately popular	San Jose, Rincon del la Vieja, Dominical, Mal Pais, Montezuma, Cahuita, Drake Bay
Between not very popular and moderately popular	Alajuela, Sarapiqui, Bijagua, Manzanillo, Puerto Jimenez
Not very popular	Liberia, Heredia, Cartago, Turrialba, Puntarenas, Limon, Golfito

A word to the wise

Although you may feel inclined to visit less popular destinations than popular ones during your Costa Rica trip (there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get off the beaten path), it’s important to realize that popular destinations have their advantages and cutting them out of a trip itinerary has its consequences. Popular destinations are where you’ll find several of Costa Rica’s top experiences (in most cases, the destination became popular because it’s where you’ll find a great experience), not to mention a convenient assortment of accommodation, restaurant, and tour offerings. Sometimes, skipping a popular destination in favor of a less popular one translates to lower quality experiences and less variety across accommodations, restaurants, and tours, so you’d be wise to consider that before making any final decisions about where to go in Costa Rica.

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider the tours and activities you want to experience.

The most popular types of tours and activities in Costa Rica

If you’ve chosen Costa Rica as your vacation destination, the chances are good that you want to be active. (Most people don’t come to Costa Rica simply to lay on a beach.) The good news is, you’ll have your pick of things to do. According to the ICT statistic mentioned previously in this article, there are at least 44 types of activities that travelers can experience in Costa Rica, although we could easily draft a longer list. Activity options not only range in type but also in duration, price, location, minimum age limit required for participation, physical effort, and, you guessed it, popularity. Some activities are the country’s best and they pique the interest of many travelers. Others are lesser known and appeal to select groups of people. Suffice to say, the number of travelers that you’ll encounter while participating in tours and activities in Costa Rica depends on the exact tours and activities you choose to experience and the popularity of each.

Examining every possible tour and activity in Costa Rica with respect to its popularity would be an endless task. Instead, our chart below categorizes tours and activities in Costa Rica according to their popularity so you can identify which experiences are more likely than others to result in encounters with other travelers. Note that popularity on average is considered here because the popularity of an activity is dependent on the popularity of the destination at which the activity takes place as well as the time of year and time of day that the activity is experienced.

Popularity level among tourists	Tour or activity
Very popular	Hiking tours (national park and reserve tours), wildlife-watching tours and wildlife center visits, zip-lining tours (canopy tours), hanging bridge tours, white-water rafting tours
Between moderately popular and very popular	Bird-watching tours, canyoning/rappelling tours, coffee tours, hot spring visits, safari float tours, volcano tours
Moderately popular	Aerial tram rides, ATV tours, chocolate tours, dolphin- and whale-watching tours, fishing tours, horseback-riding tours, mangrove tours, night tours, sailing tours, SCUBA diving tours
Between not very popular and moderately popular	sugarcane tours (trapiche tours), garden tours, kayaking tours, mountain biking tours, mud bath visits, snorkeling tours, waterfall jumping tours
Not very popular	Canoeing tours, stand-up paddleboarding tours, cave tours, city/village tours, cooking classes, dance lessons, freediving tours, tubing tours

Here’s what some of the tours and activities look like with respect to the crowds and groups—or lack thereof—that you may encounter at each:

Obviously, as we alluded to above, there is variability within each type of tour and activity with respect to popularity. Zip-lining tours in La Fortuna and Monteverde, home to Costa Rica’s best zip-lining experiences, are more popular than zip-lining tours in the Central Valley or Southern Pacific region, for example. Similarly, white-water rafting tours on the Pacuare River, regarded as the best river in Costa Rica for rafting given its class 3/4 rapids and remote jungle-clad setting, are more popular than white-water rafting tours run on every other river in the country. On average, we’d classify the majority of tours and activities in Costa Rica as being moderately popular, meaning that you’ll likely experience them alongside a few other people but not groups or crowds of people. However, the below chart outlines exceptions to this general rule, listing eight notably popular tours and activities that tend to receive an above-average number of visitors. It’s fair to assume that you’ll encounter multiple tour groups when participating in any one of these tours or activities, especially if you visit Costa Rica during the high season.

Tour or activity name	Location in Costa Rica
Tours at the Sky Adventures Park (zip-lining, hanging bridges, and aerial tram)	accessed from La Fortuna/Arenal (Northern Inlands region)
Tours at the Mistico Park (hanging bridges and horseback riding)	accessed from La Fortuna/Arenal (Northern Inlands region)
Tours at the Selvatura Park (zip-lining, hanging bridges, sloth habitat, butterfly garden, and herpetarium)	accessed from Monteverde (Northern Inlands region)
Tours of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve	accessed from Monteverde (Northern Inlands region)
Tours of the Pacuare River (white-water rafting)	accessed from San Jose/Alajuela (Central Valley region), La Fortuna/Arenal/Sarapiqui (Northern Inlands region), or Puerto Viejo de Talamanca/Cahuita/Manzanillo (Caribbean region)
Tours at the La Paz Waterfall Gardens (waterfalls and wildlife exhibits)	accessed from San Jose/Alajuela (Central Valley region) or Sarapiqui (Northern Inlands region)
Tours of the Jaguar Rescue Center (wildlife exhibits)	accessed from Puerto Viejo de Talamanca/Cahuita/Manzanillo (Caribbean region)
Tours of Isla Tortuga’s main island/beach (Isla Tolinga/Playa Tolinga)	accessed from Puntarenas/Montezuma/Santa Teresa/Mal Pais (Puntarenas region) and Jaco (Central Pacific region)

Here’s what the eight above-mentioned tours and activities may look like, with respect to the tour groups, if/when you experience them:

The most popular national parks in Costa Rica

Travelers also gather at government-protected land sites (national parks, reserves, and refuges) in Costa Rica, although usually not in great numbers. By a landslide, the Manuel Antonio National Park is Costa Rica’s most visited national park, but every other national park in the country receives, on average throughout the year, less than 750 people per day. That’s a far cry from the visitor counts at other national parks around the world, including the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (US), which receives approximately 35,000 people each day, and the Banff National Park (Canada), which receives roughly 11,300 people each day. Here’s a list of the 12 most visited government-protected land sites in Costa Rica (i.e., privately-owned parks, reserves, and refuges are excluded), in case you’re considering visiting one or more of them during your trip:

Name	Number of visitors per year (locals and tourists)
Manuel Antonio National Park	465,735 (roughly 1,275 per day, on average)
Marino Ballena National Park	260,713 (roughly 714 per day, on average)
Poás Volcano National Park	214,399 (roughly 587 per day, on average)
Irazú Volcano National Park	211,660 (roughly 579 per day, on average)
Tortuguero National Park	208,808 (roughly 572 per day, on average)
Tenorio Volcano National Park	173,159 (roughly 587 per day, on average)
Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge	169,162 (roughly 474 per day, on average)
Cahuita National Park	150,415 (roughly 587 per day, on average)
Arenal Volcano National Park	126,965 (roughly 412 per day, on average)
Rincón De La Vieja National Park	77,048 (roughly 211 per day, on average)
Corcovado National Park	74,898 (roughly 205 per day, on average)
Carara National Park	38,116 (roughly 104 per day, on average)

And, here’s what all of those protected land sites look like in terms of the size of groups or crowds, if any, that you may encounter at each:

For what it’s worth, Ricky and I have hiked most of Costa Rica’s national parks multiple times (during the high season and the low season), and throughout those experiences, it was more often the case that we encountered no travelers, few travelers, or a handful of very small tour groups (comprised of no more than five people per group) than large tour groups or a consistent flow of self-guided hikers. With the exception of the wildly popular Manuel Antonio National Park, groups and crowds, when they do exist, are more likely to be found at adventure parks and other private attractions than national parks and other government-protected spaces.

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider the time of day that you’re active.

The busiest time(s) of day to participate in tours and activities

Over the course of a year, Costa Rica feels the busiest during the high season, when the greatest number of international visitors are in the country. But the feeling of busyness can fluctuate throughout the day too. Most tours and activities have early-morning start times, typically between 6:00am and 8:30am. Other tours and activities run at blocks of time throughout the day (every hour on the hour or every few hours), and a select few half-day tours run twice daily, once in the early morning and again in the early afternoon (between 12:00pm and 2:00pm). Morning tour times tend to sell out the fastest, making the morning the most popular time of day to be active. Specifically, tours that start between 7:00am and 11:00am are the most sought-after and tend to produce larger tour groups than tours taken at different times of the day, although that’s not to suggest that all tours experienced between 7:00am and 11:00am are busy.

The busiest time(s) of day to explore destinations

With respect to destinations (cities, towns, villages, and communities) and not specific to the tours and activities that are at those destinations, on average throughout the day (on any given day), destinations feel the busiest between 5:00pm and 6:00pm. This window of time is not only when the majority of travelers eat dinner, it’s also when the majority of travelers have time to explore a destination’s core, whether it be a town center or merely a main drag. By 5:00pm, most full-day tours have finished, most half-day tours that started in the early afternoon have wrapped up, most night tours haven’t yet begun, and most travelers who arrived at the destination earlier in the day, checked into their accommodation, and got settled are ready to head out on the town. The 5:00pm-6:00pm hour is also the prime hour for sunset-viewing in Costa Rica and it tends to draw people out of their accommodations. When a large percentage of a destination’s visitors descends upon the center of the destination at roughly the same time, it creates the feeling that the destination is full, or at least that it’s busier than one might have thought, a feeling that isn’t as obvious during the day when travelers are scattered around town at different attractions. For this reason, Costa Rica destinations often appear to come alive in the late afternoon/early evening, with restaurants at the most popular destinations sometimes requiring reservations for dinner.

Is Costa Rica busy? Consider the mode(s) of transportation that you use.

The busiest types of transportation services

Despite popular belief, most guided activities (zip-lining tours, coffee tours, etc.) aren’t carried out in large groups. Large groups are typically broken down into smaller groups, with each smaller group having its own tour guide. When you’re most likely to find yourself in a large group with other travelers is when you use shared transportation services. Shared shuttle services, boat and water taxi services, public bus services, and tour transportation services are all forms of shared transportation and each one typically requires travelers to form groups. (Tour transportation services use adventure and nature tours to travel between two destinations; you can learn more about them in our related blog post Costa Rica Tour Transportation: How To Use Tours To Travel Between Destinations.) Transportation services used during Costa Rica’s high season, or for routes between popular destinations, receive the highest number of travelers, but you may still encounter groups during the low season and/or for services used for less popular routes. Some transportation service providers require groups to be a certain size before they’ll confirm a transportation service, to ensure they have enough paying travelers to offset the cost of operating the service.

Our answer to the question, “Is Costa Rica busy?”

In our opinion, the answer to the incredibly general, ambiguous question “Is Costa Rica busy?” is: “No, Costa Rica is not busy.” Costa Rica is growing in popularity and commercial development and therefore is busier today than it was in years prior, but we wouldn’t yet define it as busy, at least not in the way that many travelers find annoying. Obviously, as this article addresses, some places, experiences, modes of transportation, times of year, and times of day are busier than others, but on average, the touristic nation is not profoundly busy.

Ways to avoid busyness in Costa Rica

If, after reading our article above, you determine that Costa Rica is busier than you’d like it to be (sincerely, congratulations for defining what busyness means to you!), don’t give up on visiting the country just yet. To briefly summarize our article above, here are some ways to avoid busyness in Costa Rica:

• Travel during the low season.
• Stay at destinations identified as “Not very popular” or “Between not very popular and moderately popular” on the chart provided above in this article.
• Seek out experiences that are off most tourists’ radars (i.e., that tours/activities identified as “Not very popular” or “Between not very popular and moderately popular” on the chart provided above in this article).
• Choose afternoon tour/activity times, when offered.
• Avoid exploring the hub of your chosen destination(s) in the late afternoon/early evening.
• Plan to use either a rental car or private transfer services to move around Costa Rica.

Travel groups and crowds don’t have to make or break your travel plans; you can join them, sidestep them, or avoid them entirely, all the while executing the Costa Rica vacation of your dreams. 🙂

QUESTION TO COMMENT ON: Did you find Costa Rica to be busier or less busy than you were expecting?

Pura vida!

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