Limón

The province's character comes from a migration: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers arrived from Jamaica and the wider British Caribbean to build the railway to the coast and then to work the banana plantations, and they stayed. What they brought is still audible and visible. Many older families speak an English-based creole at home — Limonese Creole, called Mekatelyu locally — alongside Spanish, which means a visitor with English may catch fragments of something familiar and not quite placeable. Calypso is the province's own music, played on guitar and banjo with lyrics that comment on local life, and it sits alongside reggae and soca in a coastal soundscape that belongs to the Caribbean rather than to Central America. The province holds the country's biggest carnival, a week of parades, music and street food that fills Puerto Limón and draws people back from all over Costa Rica. The kitchen is the other half of this inheritance and it is genuinely the best cooking in the country — coconut milk, thyme, Scotch bonnet, slow stews — which the food guide sets out in full. What matters here is that none of this is heritage staged for visitors. It is how the province lives, and the appropriate posture is that of a guest in a place with its own way of doing things rather than an audience.

The northern half of the province is one of the strangest and best landscapes in Costa Rica: a network of natural freshwater canals and lagoons running parallel to the sea behind a long, dark, wave-battered beach, with rainforest pressing in on both sides. There is no road. You come in along the waterways or you fly, and once there you move by boat, which changes the whole texture of the visit — engines off, drifting the channel edges at dawn while howler monkeys start up somewhere above you. The wildlife is exceptional and unusually easy to see because the canals give you sightlines the forest floor never would: caimans on the banks, river otters, three species of monkey, sloths, toucans and a serious list of herons and kingfishers. The beach is why the place is famous. Green turtles come ashore here in numbers through the middle months of the year to nest, in one of the most important nesting sites of its kind in the western hemisphere, and leatherbacks come earlier in the year. Nesting visits run at night with licensed guides in controlled groups, and the rules — no lights, no photographs, no crowding — are the reason the site still works. The sea itself is not for swimming: the surf is heavy and the currents are strong. That is not a disappointment so much as a clarification about what this destination is for.

South of the port a single road runs down the coast to the Panamanian border, and along it sits the part of Limón most people picture: a string of small, low-rise, unhurried beach towns backed by forest. Cahuita has the province's most accessible national park, a flat coastal trail running for several kilometres between the sea and the trees where sloths, howler monkeys, coatis and land crabs are seen casually rather than sought, and offshore it has the best surviving coral reef on this coast, snorkelled from a boat on calm days. Further down, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca is the coast's social centre — a small town with serious surf at its edges, a wide spread of places to eat and stay, and a reputation that has grown without the place being rebuilt. Beyond it the road continues through a run of quieter beaches to Manzanillo, where a wildlife refuge protects a stretch of forest, mangrove and reef right where the coast turns towards Panama, and where the swimming is the gentlest on this shore. Inland, the Talamanca hills hold the territories of the Bribri and Cabécar peoples, and several communities run their own visits — a walk through cultivated forest, a demonstration of how cacao becomes chocolate by hand, a meal — booked directly with the community. The cocoa itself is a genuine local industry here, not a souvenir, and a farm visit is one of the better half-days on this coast.

The province's most useful practical fact is that its weather does not follow the rest of the country. When the Pacific side is at its wettest, Limón is often at its brightest, and its own driest and most reliable stretch tends to fall in the months when the rest of Costa Rica is having its worst — with a second drier window early in the year. This inversion is the single thing that determines whether a Caribbean leg works, and it is why some visitors have the best weather of their trip here while others are cancelling elsewhere; the trip-planning guide treats it as a planning lever. Rain here is rarely a washout in any case — the coast is green because it is wet, and a shower passes. Puerto Limón itself is the country's main Caribbean port, a working town of container cranes, railway history and a decent market, and it is honest to say most travellers use it as a junction rather than a destination. Give it an hour and a walk along the seafront if you are passing through. Note too that the province is a long, thin thing: the drive from the mountains down to the coast and then south takes most of a morning, and the northern canals are a separate journey altogether rather than a stop along the way. Plan Limón as one region with two destinations in it and the coast rewards the time; plan it as a day trip from the highlands and it will not.