Costa Rica's Amazon — accessible only by boat, a canal network through tropical rainforest where green sea turtles nest on the beach and caimans surface at dawn
Tortuguero National Park (31,174 ha of tropical rainforest and 52 km of Caribbean coastline in the Limón Province of northeastern Costa Rica, accessible only by boat or small aircraft — no road reaches Tortuguero) is the most important nesting site for the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) in the Western Hemisphere: approximately 22,000-35,000 female green turtles nest on the Tortuguero beach annually (July-October, the main nesting season, with the hatching in August-November), making the 35km black-sand beach the largest green turtle nesting colony in the Atlantic and Caribbean region. The…
Tortuguero's conservation history begins with Archie Carr (the American marine biologist who arrived at Tortuguero in 1954, documented the catastrophic decline of the green sea turtle population from commercial hunting, and founded the Caribbean Conservation Corporation — now Sea Turtle Conservancy — in 1959, the world's oldest sea turtle research and conservation organization). The green sea turtle at Tortuguero was historically the most commercially hunted sea turtle in the Atlantic: the 'green turtle soup' trade (the green turtle's fat was used for soup, the staple of the Victorian English…