• Introduction
• 1. Ao Phra Nang Beach
• 2. Baía de Sancho
• 3. Costa de la Luz
• 4. Long Bay
• 5. Palmetto Point Beach
• 6. Santa Teresa
• 7. Shipwreck Beach
• 8. Trou d’Argent
• 9. Uoleva Island
• 10. Whitehaven Beach

Santa Teresa

While Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula may already be a bona fide surfer-haven, mainstream tourism has yet to discover the largely untrammeled stretch of Santa Teresa’s coast on the peninsula’s southernmost tip. You’ll have to endure a nearly 6-hour trek to get here – a car-ferry combo from San José, much of which is on a barely drivable dirt road – which may be why the jungle-swathed stretch from the beach villages of Malpais to Santa Teresa is still so preserved. Fronted by the Pacific’s unruly waves and backed only by jungle, even the few bungalow boutiques and hammock hotels are set beneath the lush canopy, unseen from the sand. Besides a few surfers out by the breaks and perhaps some mischievous monkeys pillaging for fruit in the canopy, you’re likely to have the beach to yourself. Come in the off season (summer through fall) for even more solitude; September brings migrating whales just offshore, often visible from the sand.

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