National Parks
For those national and foreign tourists that desire to walk through natural landscapes while contemplating the diversity of the flora and Fauna of our guanacastecan lands, they could do so in some of the seven National Parks that this province offers its visitors.This parks offer not just a wonderful biodiversity in the ecosystems of the dry and tropical forests, but a taste of the cultural patrimony that Costa Rica offers.
Guanacaste Conservation Area
The mission of the Guanacaste Conservation Area is to conserve the biodiversity of the ecosystems, while at the same time serves as a model of development that integrates the management of the Area to the society and preserves cultural patrimony within the GCA.
The Guanacaste Conservation Area is an assembly of protected areas that are located in the northwest extreme of the Province of Guanacaste. It has an extension of 120,000 hectares in its terrestrial part and 70,000 hectares in the marine part.
The GCA, as it is better known, is comprised of a vast diversity of ecosystems. The GCA preserves particular characteristics suitable for the conservation of the biodiversity with representations of humid forest of the Caribbean to dry zones of the Pacific, passing trough dry, rainy, and cloudy forests, to mangrove swamp and savannahs.
Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area (ATCA)
The Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area includes part of the volcanic mountain Range of Guanacaste and the mountain Range of Tilarán. The volcanos Miravalles and Tenorio are the most important ones, as well as the Arenal reservoir. The reservoir is the main energy and irrigation source of the country and has experienced the most significant development of tourism within the area. In fact, more than the 70% of the Costa Rican electric power is generated in Arenal, which also produces the 100% of wind and geothermal power.
On the other hand, the area contains a high diversity of environments, ecosystems and species, distributed in eight zones of different life that extend from dry tropical forest to the rain forest of middle altitude, with equal number of zones in ecological transition. Due to the vast altitudinal variations (of the sea level to the 2080 meters of height), diverse climatic regimes are bread and geological formations of different ages are present.
Tempisque Conservation Area (TCA)
The Tempisque Conservation Area is an area of great topographical diversity that rises from sea level to the 1,018 mts (Cerro Azul), with outstanding resources like secondary, humid, and dry forest; morass, pasturelands; lagoons, mangrove swamps, among others.
This area is responsible for the conservation and protection of the middle and low basins of the Tempisque river and some hills of the peninsula of Nicoya. It also protects and conserves the biodiversity of the marine resources, the wildlife, the hydrologic state, the dry tropical forest, the sources of water and natural springs, the habitat of water birds, the wetlands, the spawning of the turtles, and the zone maritime-terrestrial among others.