La Fortuna is the town where you sleep, eat and plan the whole trip around Arenal Volcano. It is small, flat and walkable. There is a central park with a view of the cone, a white church, sodas serving cheap casado and dozens of tour agencies. A few kilometres away you'll find a 70-metre waterfall you can swim at, free hot-water rivers and hot spring resorts at every price. It is the practical base for northern Costa Rica.
The main thing people do from here is get in the water. You can walk down the 530 steps to La Fortuna Waterfall or float in the warm river at El Choyín beside the road. Or you can pay for a day at the hot pools in Baldi, Paradise, Ecotermales or Tabacón. For adrenaline seekers there is canyoning down waterfalls, rafting on the Balsa River and ziplining through the trees. For quieter days, cacao and coffee farms show the process from start to finish.
La Fortuna also works as a springboard. You can make a day trip to Río Celeste, the turquoise river in Tenorio Volcano National Park. Or you can visit Caño Negro, a wetland near the Nicaraguan border that you explore by boat. With direct buses from San José and shuttles to almost anywhere in the country, it is a logical stop between the capital, Monteverde and Guanacaste. It helps to know in advance what is paid in dollars, what is free and what is forbidden, such as climbing Cerro Chato.
According to the ICT mini-guide, the first family settled in the area in 1914 and 1915, in the sector now called La Palma. The community took shape in the early 1940s with farmers from Ciudad Quesada, Grecia, Alajuela and other parts of San Carlos. They lived from farming, hunting and cattle. The hamlet was called El Burío and kept that name until 1948. That year Rufino Quesada, Antonio Hidalgo and Isolina Quesada pushed for the change to La Fortuna because of the area's natural wealth. In 1950 residents voted in a plebiscite to move from the canton of San Ramón to San Carlos, and on 5 February 1952 an executive decree made it a district. For two decades it was a farming and cattle town, growing cassava, tiquizque, plantain and papaya. Everything changed on 29 July 1968. Arenal, thought to be a dormant hill, erupted. It wiped out Tabacón and Pueblo Nuevo to the west and left dozens dead (Wikipedia cites 82). The lava did not reach La Fortuna. In the years that followed, the volcano stayed active and, together with Lake Arenal and the hot springs, drew more and more travellers. The district's population grew from 2,931 in 1963 to 16,150 in 2022. The volcano stopped producing lava around 2010, but by then tourism had already shifted to hot springs, adventure and nature. The Asociación de Desarrollo Integral de La Fortuna (ADIFORT), founded in 1969, has run La Fortuna Waterfall for decades. Its admission fees pay for the town's roads, schools and security.
Read the full history ↓The country's largest province, stretching from the Central Valley to the Northern Plains: birthplace of the hero Juan Santamaría, land of the Poás and Arenal volcanoes, home of the Sarchí oxcarts and gateway to the wetlands, waterfalls and turquoise rivers of the north.
Read the history of Alajuela →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 14 activities in La Fortuna Volcan Arenal. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For centuries, the imposing cone we know today as Arenal Volcano was, to the people of northern Costa Rica, little more than a jungle-covered hill. It had gone hundreds of years with no known eruptive activity —later geological studies estimated some 400 years of apparent rest— and many locals did not even consider it a volcano, just one more mountain between the San Carlos plains and the foothills of the Tilarán range.
The region was inhabited in pre-Columbian times by Indigenous peoples linked to the cultures of the northern slope and Guanacaste, who left archaeological traces in the area of the present-day lake. With the arrival of settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the low, fertile lands around the volcano filled up with families working in cattle ranching and farming. The settlement that would become La Fortuna was born of that agricultural colonization, in a setting of jungle, rivers and highly productive volcanic soils.
The name 'La Fortuna' reflects, according to local tradition, the good luck of its settlers thanks to the fertility of the land and the abundance of water. No one imagined back then that the 'sleeping hill' dominating the landscape held inside it a force capable of changing the region's history forever.
Everything changed on the morning of July 29, 1968. After several days of earthquakes in the area, Arenal Volcano woke suddenly and with extreme violence. A series of gigantic explosions opened new craters on its western flank and hurled glowing rock, gas and pyroclastic flows at high speed several kilometers away. The eruption caught everyone off guard: that 'sleeping hill' turned out to be an active, dangerous volcano.
The flows and the rain of stones wiped out the settlements lying in the path of the blast —Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luis—, causing 87 deaths and burying more than 15 square kilometers under rock, lava and ash. It was one of the worst natural tragedies in Costa Rica's modern history, and it left a deep mark on the region's communities, which had to rebuild and learn to live alongside a volcano that would never again be still.
The 1968 eruption was not an isolated episode but the start of a long phase of continuous activity. In the years and decades that followed, the Arenal kept up persistent Strombolian activity, building a new active cone and frequently sending out lava flows, gas columns and explosions. What had begun as a catastrophe became, over time, a geological phenomenon that would put the region on the world map.
After the 1968 eruption, the Arenal entered a phase of almost continuous eruptive activity that would last more than four decades. The volcano built a new active cone and regularly sent out lava flows down its slopes, columns of gas and ash, and explosions that threw out glowing blocks. At night the show was overwhelming: rivers of bright lava running down the dark flank of the cone, visible from all around.
That unique and accessible phenomenon transformed the region's economy. From the 1980s and 1990s onward, La Fortuna went from being a quiet farming town to one of Costa Rica's main tourist destinations. Travelers from all over the world arrived hoping to see the lava at night, and a whole industry blossomed around that attraction: hotels, restaurants, tour operators and, above all, the thermal complexes that tap the volcano's geothermal heat.
To protect the volcano and its rainforest surroundings, Arenal Volcano National Park was created in 1991 as part of the Arenal-Tempisque Conservation Area. The park safeguards not only the active cone but also forests, water sources and remarkable biodiversity. The mix of adventure, nature and thermal downtime cemented La Fortuna as one of the great pillars of the nature-tourism model that made Costa Rica famous worldwide.
While the volcano was busy with its eruptive phase, another great transformation of the landscape was taking shape at its feet. In the 1970s, Costa Rica built a dam to create a large reservoir using the area's water: that is how Laguna (or Lago) de Arenal, the country's largest lake, came to be. The project had one central goal: to generate hydroelectric power, which for decades has supplied a significant share of Costa Rica's electricity, in a country that bases much of its energy mix on renewable sources.
Creating the reservoir meant flooding land where there were villages and farms. The old village of Arenal ended up under water, and its inhabitants were relocated to a new settlement built higher up, known today as Nuevo Arenal. That story of a village submerged beneath the lake is part of the region's memory and usually comes up on tours of the area.
The lake did not just serve its energy purpose; it also completed the tourist landscape that visitors fall for today: the Arenal cone reflected in its calm water. On top of that, its western end, toward Tilarán, turned out to have exceptionally steady winds, which made it one of the best spots in Central America for windsurfing and kitesurfing and also encouraged wind farms on the nearby hills.
After more than four decades of almost continuous activity, Arenal Volcano entered a new phase from 2010 on. The eruptions, lava flows and explosions that had been its signature for so many years gradually stopped, and the volcano moved into a period of rest, or eruptive calm, that continues to this day. For volcanologists this does not mean the volcano is 'switched off' —it is still an active volcano, closely monitored by institutions such as OVSICORI—, only that it is going through a stage of less surface activity.
The end of the nighttime lava forced the region to reinvent what it offered visitors. La Fortuna, which for years had sold the spectacle of the lava, proved that its appeal went far beyond it: the waterfall, the hot springs, the national park trails, the hanging bridges, the lake, the rafting, the wildlife watching and the trips to nearby destinations such as Río Celeste or Caño Negro kept the destination at the very top of Costa Rican tourism. Today La Fortuna is one of the most visited spots in the country.
The Arenal of today is a volcano at rest but under watch, its symmetrical cone still dominating the landscape and its geothermal heat still feeding the hot springs travelers enjoy so much. Its story —from sleeping hill to tragedy, from tragedy to natural spectacle and from spectacle to established destination— is also the story of how a community learned to live with a volcano and to turn its force into a sustainable way of life.
