Sarapiqui, La Selva Biological Station, El Lugar Resort | Costa Rica 2026

We spent two nights in the lowland rainforest near La Selva Biological Station. It is known throughout the world as a center for tropical research, but what I remember first is not the science. It is the quiet satisfaction of walking a forest trail and realizing that the people approaching you are not tourists or guides, but scientists—men and women who have devoted years, sometimes decades, to understanding a single thread in the immense fabric of this place. Every encounter reminded me that curiosity, too, can become a way of belonging.

We stayed at El Lugar, where the forest seemed unwilling to recognize the boundaries of a resort. The diversity we found there was astonishing, and it continued inside La Selva itself. Birds, frogs, insects, mammals, fungi—each appeared less as an isolated discovery than as another voice in an ongoing conversation the forest had been conducting long before we arrived.

La Selva is difficult to describe without resorting to superlatives, though they somehow diminish it. It is vast, certainly, but not only in its biological richness. It possesses an aesthetic depth that asks you to slow your pace, and an intellectual generosity that rewards every question with ten more. The place seems to suggest that knowledge is not accumulated here so much as approached, patiently, with humility.

I found myself thinking that if I returned to Costa Rica, I would plan the journey differently. I would come back to La Selva not simply to visit, but to remain for a while—to rise with the dawn chorus, to walk the same trails repeatedly, and to allow familiarity, rather than novelty, to reveal the forest. Some landscapes ask only to be seen. Others ask for your time. La Selva belongs to the latter.