Things to Do in Papagayo (Guanacaste, Costa Rica)

The Papagayo Peninsula is a curl of land on Costa Rica’s northwest Pacific coast, in the province of Guanacaste. It encloses Bahía Culebra — calm, deep, sheltered from open Pacific swells — which made it a natural setting for a planned tourism enclave (the ‘Gulf of Papagayo Project’) that opened in the late 1990s. The region is dry tropical forest (very different from the rainforests further south), the sun is reliable, and Liberia International Airport (LIR) is a 30-minute drive — making this the easiest part of Costa Rica to reach from North America.