We arrive at Playa Cativo throughout golden hour. The jungle is seductively aglow, chartreuse palm fronds backlit by the setting solar. As our boat speeds throughout the uneven cove, I maintain on tight to my Imperial, fastidiously elevating the glass bottle to my lips between waves.
The solely method to attain this secluded slice of paradise—a 1,000-acre personal nature reserve bordering Piedras Blancas National Park in Costa Rica’s Osa area—is by boat. By now, the night’s creeping shadow has forged itself throughout the ocean, lending a tinge of enchantment to the darkish emerald waters.
“We call this place Golfo Dulce, or ‘sweet gulf,’ because all the rivers around this area feed into the sea, bringing fresh water,” says Laura Vega, one in every of Playa Cativo’s native concierges, who picked me and two different journalists up within the close by city of Golfito, following a brief propeller aircraft journey from San José.
Separating mainland Costa Rica from the Osa Peninsula, Golfo Dulce is one of many world’s 4 “tropical fjords,” Vega says. Similar to its Scandinavian sisters, inexperienced mountains rise starkly from the water’s edge. But as an alternative of snowy ridges and swaths of farmland, the hills are blanketed with dense tree canopies and serpentine mangrove roots.
The cause Golfo Dulce is so well-protected—and tough to entry—is as a result of it’s surrounded by national park land, Vega explains as our boat nears the sandy stretch of shoreline marking Playa Cativo. Directly behind the resort is Piedras Blancas National Park; throughout the gulf is Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula. Together, they kind “a protected corridor for more than 148,000 hectares of tropical rainforest, home to all sorts of mammals, monkeys, birds, and mountain life,” she tells us.
The 300-square-mile inlet is one of many solely locations on the planet the place each Northern and Southern Hemisphere humpback whales start and nurse their younger, quickly overlapping on their manner from their respective Arctic and Antarctic feeding grounds. This truth has helped Golfo Dulce earn a designation as Latin America’s first Whale Heritage Site (one in every of solely eight such designations worldwide). We received’t see any on this journey—peak whale watching season is between July and October—however resident pods of dolphins and sea turtles reside within the heat, protected waters year-round.
