Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

By Nelson Guda

If you are planning to visit Costa Rica we would like you to have the most extraordinary experience by staying with us at Casa Corcovado. The lodge is the closest to Corcovado National Park, the last remaining Pacific lowland rainforest of sustainable size in Central America. Located on the Osa Peninsula in southwestern Costa Rica, Corcovado is the "crown jewel" of a world-renowned national park system.

Including thirteen separate ecosystems, almost one hundred species of trees and nearly four hundred species of birds, Corcovado has been called "the most biologically intense place on earth" by no less an authority than the National Geographic Society. Here among the largest trees of Costa Rica, can be found the densest population of tapirs, jaguars and scarlet macaws in Meso-America.

Preserving the rainforest is vital because already one-half of the earth's rainforest has been destroyed at a rate of fifty acres a minute - an area the size of New York state every year. Gone will be the rainforest where 25% of our prescription drugs have already been found and where many others wait to be discovered. The world's first studies of the tropical forest canopies were done in Corcovado. Because of the astonishing variety of unknown life forms discovered within these "hidden worlds" the estimation of life upon this planet had to be increased twentyfold.

Casa Corcovado Jungle Lodge donates a percentage of its sales to CORCOVADO FOUNDATION, which is a nonprofit organization based in the Osa Peninsula.

The geography of the Osa Peninsula is diverse, allowing for many different habitats and contributing to its spectacular biological wealth. While an undulating landscape of knife blade ridges and steep, stream-cut ravines dominate the majority of the peninsula, many other landscapes can also be found. In the western end of the peninsula, a large uplifted plateau drops off into the ocean from hundred foot high rocky bluffs. Further to the North, vast stretches of mangrove swamp surround the mouth of the Sierpe, a large river that borders the peninsula.

The forests of the Osa Peninsula are generally classified as Lowland Pacific Rain Forest. Unlike the Caribbean coast which was historically covered with a long unbroken rain forest, the Pacific coast of Central America typically receives far less precipitation and has many tropical dry forests. The west coast from southern Costa Rica through Panama has rain forests due to the Talamanca mountains which act as a barrier to the moist west winds causing them to precipitate on Pacific coast and deluging the Osa Peninsula with 350-600 centimeters of rain per year.

Another unique aspect of the Pacific lowland rain forest is that it retains a biogeographical link to the Amazon basin. Many of the plants and animals found on the Osa are more closely related to species found in the Amazon Basin than any other part of Central America or northern South America.

Development and logging have severely fragmented most of the rain forest on the Pacific coast, but the Osa has retained the largest unbroken tracts of this quickly disappearing habitat.The importance of conservation in this area has not been lost on the government of Costa Rica. In 1975 the Costa Rican government created a national park on the isolated Pacific coast of the peninsula. Shortly after that another 330,000 acres of the peninsula were set aside as forest reserves. Most of this land is in the Golfo Dulce Reserve, which runs along the spine of the peninsula. When you add these reserves to the land encompassed by Corcovado National Park the total amount of protected land on the peninsula comes to 430,000 acres, or eighty percent of the peninsula itself.

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