Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
railroad, and the first 30km reportedly cost 4000 men their lives. But when the last piece
of track was laid down in 1890, the economic forces it unleashed permanently changed
Costa Rica (and the rest of Central America, for that matter). It was the dawn of the ba-
nana boom, an industry that would dominate life, politics and the environment in the re-
gion for almost a century.
Today, the railroad is no longer. An asphalt highway (Hwy 32) - through Parque Na-
cional Braulio Carrillo - links San José to the Caribbean coast, winding down the foothills
of the Cordillera Central, through agricultural plantations to the swampy lowlands around
Limón. Likewise, banana production is not as mighty as it once was, supplanted in many
areas by pineapples and African oil palms.
Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo
Enter this under-explored national park and you will have an idea of what Costa Rica
looked like prior to the 1950s, when 75% of the country's surface area was still covered in
forest: steep hills cloaked in impossibly tall trees are interrupted only by cascading rivers
and canyons. It has extraordinary biodiversity due to the range of altitudes, from steamy
2906m cloud forest alongside Volcán Barva to lush, humid lowlands on the Caribbean
slope. Its most incredible feature, however, is that this massive park is only 30 minutes
north of San José.
Founded in the 1970s, Braulio Carrillo's creation was the result of a unique compromise
between conservationists and developers. At the time, the government had announced a
plan to build a new highway that would connect the capital to Puerto Limón. Back then,
San José's only link to its most important port was via a crumbling railway or a slow rural
road through Cartago and Turrialba. The only feasible route for the new thoroughfare was
along a low pass between the Barva and Irazú volcanoes - an area covered in primary
forest. Conservationists were deeply worried about putting a road (and any attendant de-
velopment) in an area that served as San José's watershed. So a plan was hatched: the road
would be built, but the 475 sq km of land to either side of it would be set aside as a nation-
al park. Thus, in 1978, Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo was born.
