San José Province, Costa Rica

The capital sits in the middle of the province in a broad, mild, mountain-ringed valley at around eleven hundred metres, which gives it a spring-like climate all year and is the reason most of the country lives in this basin. It is not a beautiful city and it does not pretend to be — it is a low-rise, traffic-heavy, energetic working capital whose appeal is in specific things rather than in a skyline: two outstanding museums holding pre-Columbian gold and jade, a grand old national theatre, a covered central market that has been trading for well over a century, and a couple of leafy, low-key neighbourhoods with the country's best restaurants and coffee. Ringing it, the valley's towns run up the surrounding slopes into coffee ground and cooler air, and the western suburbs in particular are where a large share of the country's professional and expatriate life happens. The honest advice is that a day is enough for most visitors and that the day is worth having rather than skipping — it is the only place in the country where you get a sense of Costa Rica as a society rather than as a set of landscapes. The capital city guide covers the neighbourhoods, the museums and how to move around it; what follows is everything above and beyond the valley rim.

The road south-east out of the valley climbs steadily onto the spine of the Talamanca range and crosses it at over three thousand metres, and the change in vegetation on the way up is one of the more dramatic short journeys in the country. Rainforest gives way to a cool, moss-heavy oak cloud forest — huge, slow-growing, epiphyte-laden trees that look nothing like lowland jungle — and above that to open páramo, a high shrubby plateau of tussock and dwarf bamboo where the temperature can drop below freezing before dawn. Off the top of the pass, a steep valley drops into a pocket of old-growth oak forest along a clear river, and this is the place serious birdwatchers come for. The resplendent quetzal — long-tailed, iridescent, and the bird most people who care about birds most want to see — is resident here in numbers, and its favoured food tree is common in the valley, which makes sightings during the nesting months close to dependable. It is also excellent for hummingbirds, and the same river supports trout farms and highland apple and blackberry growing, so the local eating is unusual for Costa Rica: trout, apples, and hot drinks by a fire. Bring genuinely warm clothing, which almost nobody does — the health and safety guide treats altitude and cold as real risks here rather than as a novelty.

The country's highest summit rises from the range along this province's south-eastern edge, standing well above the treeline at close to three thousand eight hundred metres, and it is the one place in Costa Rica with a genuine high-mountain character: glacial lakes, bare rock, exposed páramo, and on clear mornings a view that reaches both oceans at once. It is climbed on foot rather than driven or ridden, starting from a village in this province, and the standard ascent is a long, steep, unrelenting walk of some fourteen kilometres to a mountain hostel, with the summit push before dawn the following morning and the descent after. There is no technical climbing involved and there is also no shortcut: it is a serious day's effort at altitude for anyone not accustomed to it, in weather that can move from hot sun to cold rain within an hour. Overnight places at the mountain hostel are limited and administered by reservation, and they are taken a long way ahead — this is a trip to organise months in advance rather than to add to an itinerary on the ground. Porter services are available from the trailhead village and are worth every colón. The reward is a landscape no other part of the country has, and the particular satisfaction of standing above every other point in Costa Rica having walked there.

Beyond the high pass the province drops down its far side into a wide, warm agricultural valley — coffee, sugar, cattle and fruit — centred on a busy provincial city that almost no itinerary stops in. It is worth knowing about for two reasons. It is the practical base for the mountain climbs and the high forest, with the trailhead village a short drive away, and it is the junction for the whole of Costa Rica's far south, so anyone heading for the wild southern Pacific passes through. The valley itself is a good picture of ordinary Costa Rican life away from any visitor economy: a large market, a hot afternoon, a park with a church on it, and mountains on both horizons. Getting anywhere here means the mountain road, and it deserves respect — it is the country's highest highway, it crosses cloud and rain at the top, fog can cut visibility to very little, and heavy trucks grind up it in both directions. Drive it in daylight, allow far more time than the distance suggests, and treat the crossing as part of the day rather than as a transfer; the transport guide explains why that is the right posture for the whole country and doubly so here. On the province's northern flank, the highway towards the Caribbean cuts through a vast, steep, permanently wet national park of primary forest that is the wildest land within an hour of the capital. Immediately east, Cartago holds the country's old colonial capital and an entirely different set of volcanoes.