Puerto Viejo Activities
Vacation in Puerto Viejo is a delicate balance between sunshine and starlight, sunburns and hangovers. Wake up early and catch the incoming tide along the beach breaks at Playa Cocles for big swells with fast-breaking lefts and rights, or leave it to the professionals and bathe in a tide pool while watching some of the world's best surfers tackle the monster barrels and powerful waves of Salsa Brava.
Puerto Viejo's more than just sun and sand though, it's immersed among rich cacao forests where chocolatiers make their own chocolate bars from freshly harvested cacao beans –grown, dried, roasted and processed all on the farm. Trek through the rainforest of the Gandoca Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge or hike through the Talamanca Mountains in search of waterfalls inside the Kekoldi and Bribri reservations and Hitoy Cerere Biological Reserve. Off the coast, divers and snorkelers will find a whole other kind of forest beneath the Caribbean Sea; a coral forest filled with bright colorful sponges, reef, sea fans and tunicates, each hiding its own array of marine life from minnows to eels, lobsters to lion fish. Adventures off the coast of Punta Mona include dolphin watching and fishing.