About Costa Rica
In recent years Costa Rica has also become the prime eco-tourism destination in Central
America, if not in all the Americas, due in no small part to an efficient
promotion machine that trumpets the country's complex system of national parks
and wildlife refuges. Every year hundreds of thousands of visitors - mainly
from the United States and Canada - come to walk trails through
million-year-old rainforests ,
raft foaming whitewater rapids, surf on the Pacific beaches and climb
the volcanoes that punctuate the country's mountainous spine. More than
anything it is the enduring natural beauty that impresses. Milk-thick
twilight and dawn mists gather in the clefts and ridges divided by high
mountain passes; on the Pacific coast, carmine and mauve sunsets splash down
into the sea like meteors; vaulting canopy trees and thick deciduous
understoreys carpet large areas of undisturbed rainforest, and vestiges of
high-altitude cloudforest offer glimpses into a misty, primeval universe, home
to the jaguar, the lumbering Jurassic tapir and the truly resplendent quetzal.
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