Lapa Rios Lodge

On the Osa Peninsula above the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, within the buffer zone of Corcovado National Park, Lapa Rios Lodge occupies a private biological reserve of 400 acres within the most biologically intense landscape in Central America, where the interaction of the Pacific coast, the mangrove estuaries, the primary rainforest, and the cloud forest of the Osa’s interior ridgeline creates a biodiversity density that has led National Geographic to describe Corcovado as the most biologically intense place on earth. The 17 bungalows are built on a ridge above the Golfo Dulce with views across the jungle canopy to the ocean, and the sounds of the primary forest — the dawn chorus of toucans and macaws, the night sounds of the forest’s nocturnal community — constitute the primary sensory environment of a stay here.

Guided walks in the lodge’s private reserve and in Corcovado National Park itself, night tours for the jaguar, ocelot, and tapir that use the reserve’s trails after dark, snorkelling in the reef system of the Golfo Dulce, and whale and dolphin watching in the Pacific offshore waters are the principal activities from a lodge whose surrounding ecosystem offers wildlife encounters of a density and diversity unavailable at more accessible Costa Rican destinations. The kitchen’s menus draw on the Pacific seafood and the organic produce of the Osa Peninsula’s small farming community, with the lodge’s own garden supplying herbs and vegetables to a cooking programme that treats the local food culture with the same respect that the natural history programme applies to the surrounding rainforest.

Lapa Rios Lodge’s conservation model — the 400-acre private reserve maintained as a wildlife sanctuary and biological buffer for the adjacent national park — was established by the lodge’s founders before the property opened and has been maintained through a quarter-century of operation as a practical demonstration that luxury tourism and primary rainforest conservation are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing in the Osa Peninsula context.