Osa Peninsula Map

The Osa Peninsula hangs off the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, cut off from the mainland by the Golfo Dulce, one of the few tropical fjords in the world. The small outline of Costa Rica at the bottom of the map shows where it sits, in the country’s far southwest corner, just short of the border with Panama. The peninsula’s west coast runs from Drake Bay, said to be named for Francis Drake, past Punta Ganadito and the San Pedrillo Ranger Station, and down the long, empty beach of Playa Corcovado to Sirena Station, La Leona and Carate. The gulf side is gentler: Rincón, La Palma, and Puerto Jiménez, the peninsula’s only real town, facing Golfito across the water. To the north, the Sierpe River winds through the Térraba-Sierpe mangroves, the largest mangrove wetland in Costa Rica.

Most of the interior is Corcovado National Park, with no roads across it. Together with the forest reserve around it and Piedras Blancas National Park on the far shore of the gulf, it protects one of the largest blocks of lowland Pacific rainforest left in Central America. Animals of two continents meet here: scarlet macaws, Baird’s tapirs, jaguars and all four of Costa Rica’s monkeys, including the Central American squirrel monkey, which lives only along this stretch of the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and western Panama. The fiery-billed aracari is common, and the black-cheeked ant-tanager is found almost nowhere else. Gold drew miners to the Osa for generations, until the creation of Corcovado pushed them out. East of the gulf, the map runs down to the Burica Peninsula, split by the Panama border, where Pilón and the Conte Burica Indigenous Reserve look out over the sea.

My Travels on the Osa Peninsula

I came to the Osa with my family, flying low over the Golfo Dulce into Puerto Jiménez and on to the old gold-mining airstrip at Carate. I wrote about the trip, and about E. O. Wilson’s argument for setting aside half the Earth, in The Scars on Osa.