In Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica you can attend the unique spectacle of spawning of thousands of marine animals, which return to the same sand that was born.
With a quarter of its land protected as national park or nature reserve, Costa Rica overflows from rain forests, volcanoes, tropical jungles and beaches on the shores-as-point of the Pacific or the Caribbean. Between July and September, Tortuguero National Park you can enjoy a unique experience, is the time when green turtles – this enormous marine reptile that reaches beyond, into adulthood, the foot-long and up to 300 kilos in weight, come to this area for spawning the main Western Hemisphere.
Between February and July, although to a lesser extent, are attending Tortuguero leatherback turtles, and also even bigger marinas. In fact, males never leave the water and females, after incredible migration across the ocean, just do it every three or four years, to spawn on the beach where they were born.
This wilderness strewn with navigable canals and lagoons on the Caribbean slope of Costa Rica is also the fate of other marine species such as hawksbill decimated, mostly from May to October, and the loggerhead, which he stars, like its predecessors, exciting sightings. Turtles usually at night, with its prehistoric appearance and immense difficulty getting around on land, are dragged to a beach area to which the tide can not get to dig a hole in the sand about two feet depth in which to protect the hundreds of eggs to reach each.
A few months later, millions of young, hot off the nest also offer an exciting show to open, intuitive, way to the sea. Most however will not reach adulthood. Those that have survived the vultures and crabs, or other turtles nest in search of their own offspring, and of course the man will still have to deal with predators that await them at sea. But individuals that reach reproductive age throughout their lives will return to these very shores to lay their eggs.
In addition to this main course of nature, which is shipped to visitors as evening walks along the beach, carefully controlled to avoid disturbing the animals, Tortuguero, master of a good portion of rainforest that until recently Over fifty years blanketed much of the northeastern Costa Rica, can also admire the stunning biodiversity of a protected area of 26,156 hectares, not counting more than 50,000 area dedicated to marine turtles, created in 1975.
On board the boat trips between the channels and mangroves, preferably at dawn and dusk, you may leave in search of its approximately four hundred species of trees, sea grape, ICAC, palms, Sangrillo, pylons, jícaros … – about 2,200 types of other plants, more variety of birds from which sum the whole of Europe, and mammals, some of them endangered, like monkeys, tapirs, manatees, sloths, caimans and with great fortune, also jaguars, big predators of the turtles when they come to spawn.