On The Road – arrieve – Sights around San José

This is Póas volcano, a mere thirty miles from the capital, famous for the (highly acidic) blue lagoon in the crater.

It’s an active volcano, so visits are limited to twenty minutes and there are concrete shelters on the viewing platforms in case of an unexpected eruption. You also have to wear hard hats; each tour group got hats in a different color, so the trail from the visitors center to the volcano was a sea of reds and yellows and whites bobbing along through the trees. The last major eruption was in 2017, which closed the park for eighteen months, and some of the trails are still closed. You can see the effects of the acid rain from the gases that are still being emitted on the nearby landscape.

The ruins of Santiago Apóstol in central Cartago, about an hour southeast of San José.

There have been a series of churches on this site since the sixteenth century, most of them destroyed by earthquakes. The guidebooks point out that the church that’s there now isn’t technically a ruin because it was never finished. It was to have been the only Romanesque style church in Costa Rica, but after yet another earthquake in 1910 it was abandoned.

There is a legend that two brothers, one a priest, fell in love with the same woman. The priest killed his brother with a knife during Mass, and though he vowed to build a church to atone for his sin, the church was destroyed by an earthquake a year later, as was every subsequent church on the site, which is taken as proof that it is cursed.

Inside the church walls are these beautiful gardens. They’re supposedly haunted by the headless ghost of the murderous priest, but honestly, if they didn’t want the priest hanging around forever they should have made the place less appealing.

Another day, another ruined church. This one, dating from the late 17th century, is all that is left of the village of Ujarrás, which was abandoned after a flood in 1833. The land surrounding the ruins is now a park.

Looking over the Orosi valley, not far from the ruins.

Costa Rica is famous for its amazing birds, but the butterflies were much easier to photograph. I’ve always wanted to see glasswing butterflies but wasn’t in the right part of the country; the blue morphos were a nice consolation prize.

And for the BJ crowd, some critters.

Who knew sloths were so adorable? I certainly didn’t, and I have actually seen sloths in the wild, in both Costa Rica and Panama. They always looked like giant balls of brown fur glued to a tree trunk, barely animate and not at all cute, as opposed to this little guy, Milo, and his friends at the Toucan Rescue Ranch just outside San José.

We got to see toucans, monkeys, and other wildlife in addition to the sloths. Some of them had been pets; some were injured by cars or power lines. Because the goal is to return as many of the animals to the wild as possible, human contact needs to be limited, and you can only see the animals who for one reason or another can’t be rehabilitated. (One poor spider monkey for example was kept as a pet by an owner who cut off her prehensile tail to keep her from grabbing things with it.)

It takes two years to teach a sloth to live in the wild, and those, like Milo, who fail to graduate will continue to live at the ranch with yummy snacks and blankets to keep them warm for naps.

Latte, another dropout from Sloth University, considers whether that flower will make an acceptable snack. (It did.)

Sadly, I do not have a picture of my favorite animal at the ranch, Felicia—she was hiding behind some plants in her cage, so I only got glimpses. But even without a picture her story is worth telling.

Felicia is an ocelot, and was brought to the Toucan Rescue Ranch when the drug dealer who was keeping her as a pet was arrested, and the police found her sitting on the couch in his apartment. Because she was still very young, it was hoped she could be rehabilitated and returned to the wild.

The most important skill for living in the wild is obviously being able to feed yourself, and so they put a chicken in her cage to see if she would hunt it. The first day she was scared of the chicken and hid, but by the third day she had made friends with it.

So Felicia will also be spending the rest of her life at the ranch, having someone else provide her with dinner.