Puntarenas

High on the continental divide, where the trade winds push moisture up from the Caribbean side and it condenses as it crosses, sits a band of cloud forest that is one of Costa Rica's defining landscapes: trees so loaded with moss, bromeliads and orchids that the branches are gardens, a constant drifting mist, and a cool, wet, wind-blown climate that surprises everyone who packed for the tropics. The wildlife here is not the easy-viewing kind — the forest is dense and vertical and much of what lives in it is small or high up — but it holds one of the world's most sought-after birds in the resplendent quetzal, along with bellbirds, hummingbirds in quantity at the feeders, and a famously rich amphibian and insect life. This is also where the canopy zipline was invented as a research tool before it became a global tourist activity, and where suspended walkways let you stand at the level where most of the forest actually lives. The settlement above the reserves was founded in the mid-twentieth century by a small group of North American Quaker dairy farmers, and the community's dairy and its conservation ethic both date from then. Access is deliberately unimproved: the roads in are rough and always have been, which is a local choice rather than neglect. The transport guide covers the boat-and-minibus crossing that connects this forest to the volcano country to the north, which is more comfortable and far more interesting than driving around.

The province's central coastline holds its two most popular seaside destinations, and they are very different propositions. The first is a small national park where rainforest runs right down to a pair of sheltered white-sand beaches, and where sloths, iguanas, capuchins and the tiny endangered squirrel monkeys are seen at close range on an easy walking trail. Its size is its problem — it is the most visited park in the country, entry is capped and timed, the adjacent road is thoroughly developed, and going at opening time rather than mid-morning changes the experience completely. It is still worth it: nowhere else offers that much accessible wildlife beside that good a beach. An hour or so further south the coast opens into a broad bay that is one of the world's more remarkable whale-watching sites, because humpbacks arrive here from both hemispheres in two separate seasons — a southern population in the middle of the year and a northern one around the turn of it — giving the bay an unusually long total window. At its centre a sandbar extends into the sea and, at low tide, forms the unmistakable outline of a whale's tail, which you can walk out along. The towns along this stretch are lower-key than the park to the north, with surf beaches, waterfalls in the hills behind and a slower pace.

The bottom of the province is a different order of wildness. The Osa peninsula holds one of the last substantial lowland tropical rainforests on the Pacific side of the Americas, and the national park at its heart is regularly described as the most biologically intense place on the planet — a claim that survives contact with the reality. Scarlet macaws are common rather than a sighting. Four species of monkey live here, along with tapirs, all four of the country's sea turtle species offshore, and the country's most viable jaguar population, which you will almost certainly not see and which matters anyway. Access is by small plane, by boat across the gulf, or by a long drive and a longer walk, and inside the park you are on foot, staying at ranger stations or in lodges on its fringe, with guides required for much of it. It rains enormously. It is hot, humid and genuinely demanding, and it is the single most rewarding wildlife destination in Costa Rica for anyone prepared to be uncomfortable. Nearby, a small bay village serves as the usual jumping-off point and offers snorkelling, night walks and boat trips to a marine reserve island. Far offshore — three hundred kilometres out, administratively part of this province, and reachable only by liveaboard on a multi-day crossing — lies an uninhabited island whose waters hold schooling hammerheads in numbers that make it one of the handful of genuinely legendary dive sites in the world.

Two more pieces complete the list. The southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula belongs to this province rather than to Guanacaste, which catches people out, and it holds a cluster of small towns at the end of consistently bad roads: a long-established alternative-scene village on a rocky cove with a waterfall walk, and around the headland a surf and yoga strip that has grown a great deal without ever getting a paved approach. On the point itself sits the country's first protected area, a small reserve of forest and cliff with a seabird colony offshore. And the provincial capital is a curiosity in its own right — a town built along a narrow sand spit sticking out into the gulf, once the country's principal Pacific port, now a ferry terminal for the peninsula, a cruise stop and a weekend beach for the capital, with a long promenade and an unpretentious seafood culture. The thread running through all of it is distance. This province is long, its road network is coastal and slow, and its northern and southern ends are effectively different holidays. The trip-planning guide argues for two bases in a ten-day trip; within Puntarenas alone, treating the cloud forest, the central coast and the Osa as three stops on one route is the clearest version of the mistake it describes.