Conservation on the Osa: what is at stake, and what a visitor can do

The Osa Peninsula holds around 2.5% of the planet's biodiversity on roughly 0.001% of its surface. That sentence gets used in a lot of marketing, ours included. What it usually leaves out is that the number is not stable, and the reasons it is not stable are mostly local, mostly visible, and mostly connected to how visitors spend their money.

We built four small lodges inside existing forest here in 2024. This is the honest version of what we have learned about what threatens the place, and what actually helps.

What is actually at stake

Corcovado National Park covers roughly 424 km² — nearly half the peninsula — and is one of the last strongholds of the jaguar in Central America. Around it sits a patchwork that matters just as much: the Golfo Dulce Forest Reserve, Piedras Blancas National Park across the gulf, private reserves like Tranquility next door to us, and the farmland and forest fragments in between.

The park alone is not enough. Big animals — tapirs, peccaries, cats — need to move between blocks of forest, and the corridors they use run through private land. That is the entire reason we did not clear our hillside: our four lodges sit inside primary forest on a corridor between Corcovado and the Tranquility reserve, and the animals still walk through it. A gap in the corridor is not a gap in a map; it is a population that stops mixing.

The four pressures

1. Deforestation and land conversion

Costa Rica has one of the great forest-recovery stories on Earth, but on the Osa the pressure is ongoing: pasture, agriculture, and increasingly development. Each cleared hillside is a piece of corridor removed. What is bought and built here decides what the peninsula looks like in twenty years.

2. Gold mining

Gold has been panned in these rivers for generations — Dos Brazos de Río Tigre, 25 minutes from us, was a mining village before the park expanded. Small-scale panning is part of local history. Larger, illegal operations are a different matter: they cut forest, and they put mercury and sediment into rivers that run into the gulf.

3. Poaching and wildlife trade

Hunting inside and around the park continues, aimed at peccaries, tapirs and, at the very top, cats. Every animal removed from a small population matters more than it would elsewhere.

4. Infrastructure that cannot keep up

2026 has made this one impossible to ignore. Sirena, the biological station deep inside Corcovado, has had its wastewater treatment repeatedly flagged by health authorities; SINAC cut and re-cut the daily visitor cap through the year, and in August environmental organisations placed the park under a public “red alert” over sewage and crumbling infrastructure. The repairs are scheduled around the annual October closure.

It is uncomfortable for anyone selling trips to Corcovado to say this, so we will: a protected area that is under-funded and over-visited protects less. The capacity limits are not an inconvenience to work around. They are the system doing its job.

What a visitor actually controls

Most “what you can do” lists are about your carbon footprint at home. These are the ones that change something here.

• Hire local guides. Every certified guide is a person for whom a living forest is worth more than a cleared one. It is the most direct transfer of money to conservation available to you, and it happens to give you a better day — our tours all run with guides from Puerto Jiménez and Dos Brazos.
• Respect the caps and the rules. Book the permit, take the guide, do not push for the closed sector. If Sirena is full, go to La Leona or El Tigre.
• Never feed an animal. Fed capuchins become aggressive and eventually get killed; fed coatis stop foraging. It is the single most common visitor mistake here.
• Choose operators who keep their distance. On the water that means no swimming with whales, no chasing, engines down near calves. Ask before you book.
• Spend in the villages. The community-run El Tigre circuit puts money straight into Dos Brazos. So does buying lunch there.
• Come in the green season. Fewer people at once, and income spread across the year rather than concentrated in twelve weeks, is better for both the forest and the people who live off it.
• Support the organisations doing the long work — Osa Conservation, the Corcovado Foundation and others run reforestation, sea-turtle patrols and camera-trap monitoring that no lodge could fund alone.

What we do, specifically

We are a small business, not a conservation NGO, and we would rather be precise than grand about it.

• We built inside the forest, not instead of it. Four small lodges placed in existing primary forest; the hillside was not cleared.
• Solar power and our own well water.
• A deliberately rough access road. It keeps speeds low and keeps animals crossing the corridor alive. Guests occasionally wish it were smoother; that is the trade.
• Local guides, local suppliers. The zipline next door, the boat captains at the pier, the guides in town.
• Honesty about wildlife. We do not promise sightings, we do not bait animals for photographs, and we tell guests when a month or a tour is not worth it.

You can read the longer version on our philosophy page.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the Osa Peninsula so important?

It holds around 2.5% of global biodiversity in a very small area, including the largest remaining lowland rainforest on the Pacific coast of Central America and one of the last viable jaguar populations in the region.

Is Corcovado National Park under threat?

The forest itself is protected, but the infrastructure supporting it is strained. In 2026 the Sirena station's wastewater problems led to repeated cuts in daily visitor numbers and a public red alert from environmental organisations.

Does tourism help or harm the Osa?

Both, depending on how it is done. Tourism gives forest an economic value that competes with clearing it — but only if the money reaches local guides and communities, and only if visitor numbers stay inside what the place can carry.

What can I do as a traveller?

Hire local guides, respect park caps, never feed wildlife, choose operators who keep their distance from animals, spend money in the villages, and consider travelling in the green season.

Is gold mining still happening on the Osa?

Small-scale panning remains part of local life, and illegal larger-scale operations continue to cause deforestation and river contamination.

Which organisations are worth supporting?

Osa Conservation and the Corcovado Foundation are the two most visible locally, with work spanning reforestation, sea-turtle protection and wildlife monitoring.

Come and see why it matters

Maze Lodge sits on the corridor between Corcovado and the Tranquility reserve — four private lodges from $110 a night, solar-powered, built into the forest rather than in place of it. The wildlife guide covers what lives here; this piece covers why it still does.