🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Northern volcanoes and mountains
Few images sum up Costa Rica as well as Arenal Volcano: an almost perfect cone rising above the rainforest, often crowned with clouds, mirrored in a calm lake. At its feet spreads La Fortuna, a town that went from farming life to becoming one of the country's great nature-tourism hubs, without losing its warmth or its unhurried small-town Costa Rican rhythm.
For decades the Arenal was one of the most active volcanoes in the world. From its violent reawakening in 1968 until 2010, it put on a nightly show of glowing lava and explosions that drew travelers from all over the planet. Today it is in a resting phase, but its surroundings are still extraordinary: trails over old lava flows, a waterfall dropping 70 meters deep in the jungle, rivers of thermal water heated by geothermal energy and a biodiversity that includes sloths, toucans, frogs and monkeys.
This guide walks through the essentials of La Fortuna and the Arenal with a practical, warm eye: how to visit the national park and the waterfall, where to enjoy the best hot springs, which adventure activities to choose, how to get around and how to arrive from San José or from Monteverde. It's a destination that blends adrenaline, lush nature and rest like few others, ideal for opening or closing any trip through Costa Rica.
The La Fortuna region was inhabited in pre-Columbian times by Indigenous peoples of the northern zone, and for centuries the imposing Arenal was known to locals simply as a jungle-covered hill, since it had gone some 400 years with no known eruptive activity and many believed it was an inactive hill. The present-day town grew from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the agricultural settlement of the San Carlos plains, given over to cattle and crops. Everything changed on July 29, 1968, when the Arenal woke violently and catastrophically after more than 400 years of rest: a series of explosions opened new craters on its western flank and buried the settlements of Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luis, causing 87 deaths. That tragedy marked the community, but over the years the volcano entered a more stable and spectacular phase of activity, with rivers of lava visible at night, which turned La Fortuna into a tourism magnet from the 1980s and 1990s onward. Arenal Volcano National Park was created in 1991 to protect the volcano and its surroundings. In 2010 the Arenal ended its eruptive phase and went quiet. The construction of the dam and of Lake (Laguna) Arenal in the 1970s, to generate hydroelectric power, completed the landscape we know today. The full story is on our history page.
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.
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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.