🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Caribbean
Playa Cocles and Playa Chiquita are two of the most beautiful beaches on Costa Rica's Southern Caribbean coast, just south of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, on the coastal road heading toward Manzanillo, in the canton of Talamanca in the province of Limón. They are golden-sand beaches fringed by palms and jungle, with warm water, combining the relaxed surf feel of the Southern Caribbean with lush nature a few meters from the sea.
Playa Cocles is the better known for surfing: a long beach with powerful waves that has made it famous among surfers, with lifeguards on duty in season. Playa Chiquita, a little further south, is quieter and more intimate, with coves hidden among the vegetation, ideal for relaxing and swimming in its sheltered sections. The whole area breathes the Afro-Caribbean identity of this coast, with its coconut cooking, its music and its unhurried pace, plus a growing choice of boutique hotels, restaurants and wildlife sanctuaries.
This guide covers the essentials of Playa Cocles and Playa Chiquita with a practical eye: the beaches and the surf, the nature and wildlife (including the area's Jaguar Rescue Center), the culture and food of the Southern Caribbean, where to sleep and eat, and how to get there and get around from Puerto Viejo. A stretch of Caribbean coast for beach, jungle and good vibes.
Playa Cocles and Playa Chiquita are part of the Southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, in the canton of Talamanca, a region with a strong Afro-Caribbean heritage settled by descendants of Afro-Antillean immigrants (mostly Jamaicans) and by the Indigenous Bribri and Cabécar peoples. Once an area of fishers and farmers cut off from the rest of the country, from the late 20th century on it turned into a surf and nature destination while keeping its Caribbean cultural identity. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Costa Rican Caribbean: the province of the railway and the banana, cradle of Afro-Caribbean culture and of the Bribri and Cabécar peoples, land of Tortuguero and its turtles, of coral reefs and of an atmosphere of reggae, calypso and 'rice and beans' that looks like no other Costa Rica.
Read the history of Limón →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Crossing from San José to the Southern Caribbean is like changing country without leaving Costa Rica. Here breakfast smells of rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, calypso plays in the streets, you hear a creole English called mekatelyu and the pace of life drops several gears. Playa Cocles and Playa Chiquita, next to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, are the gateway to that other Costa Rica: Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous and bohemian, so different from the country of the Central Valley and the touristy Pacific.
Playa Cocles and Playa Chiquita lie in the canton of Talamanca, a region of Costa Rica's Southern Caribbean with a history and a cultural makeup all its own. Before the Europeans arrived, and still today, this territory has been home to Indigenous peoples such as the Bribri and the Cabécar, who keep their territories, languages and traditions in the mountains and valleys of the Cordillera de Talamanca, one of the areas with the strongest Indigenous presence in the country.
On top of that Indigenous root came, from the 19th century and the early 20th, the arrival of Afro-Antillean settlers —largely Jamaican— who settled along the Caribbean coast as fishers, farmers and workers tied to the railway and to the banana trade of the Limón region. From their heritage come the creole English (mekatelyu), calypso and reggae, and the coconut cooking that define the Southern Caribbean.
For much of the 20th century the Talamanca coast, including the spots of Cocles and Chiquita alongside the village of Puerto Viejo, stayed remote and hard to reach, living off small-scale fishing and crops such as cacao, which was economically important until a blight (monilia) hit the plantations hard in the middle of the century. That relative marginalization preserved both the ecosystems and the strong cultural identity of the area.
The modern history of the Costa Rican Caribbean is marked by the building of the Atlantic railway in the last decades of the 19th century, a titanic project driven by the businessman Minor Keith to connect the Central Valley with the port of Limón. Foreign labor was hired to build it, especially Afro-Antillean workers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, many of whom stayed on and settled the coast, giving rise to the Afro-Caribbean community of the province of Limón.
With the railway came the banana boom: the companies —among them the United Fruit Company, born in part out of Keith's businesses— turned Limón into one of the world's great banana centers in the early 20th century. The southern strip of Talamanca, though, where Cocles and Chiquita are, was left outside the big plantations because of its distance and the lack of roads, which kept it an area of smallholders and fishers.
Against that backdrop, cacao became the emblematic crop of the Southern Caribbean. Local families lived for decades off the cacao plantations, until monilia disease devastated them in the 1970s, triggering an economic crisis that pushed the region to look for new sources of income. That search would lead, years later, to tourism. Today cacao is coming back through small artisanal farms and chocolate tours that revive the tradition.
The fate of Cocles, Chiquita and the whole area around Puerto Viejo de Talamanca changed from the last decades of the 20th century, when better road access and growing worldwide interest in surfing and nature put the Southern Caribbean on the tourist map. The waves here —among them the legendary 'Salsa Brava' of Puerto Viejo and those of Playa Cocles— drew international surfers who found a coast still untouched and authentic.
Around the surf and the beautiful beaches of golden sand, palms and jungle, a tourism offer grew up that transformed the local economy: cabinas, boutique hotels, restaurants, surf schools and bike rentals. The area also attracted a cosmopolitan community of foreign residents, which brought a surprising diversity of food and a bohemian, international atmosphere, mixed with the Afro-Caribbean root.
That growth has not been free of tension: real estate pressure, land speculation and problems with land titles along the coastal strip have caused conflicts that are still being argued over today. Even so, Puerto Viejo and its beaches managed to grow while keeping much of their character, without the big hotel complexes of the Pacific, and holding to small and mid-scale tourism.
Alongside the tourism boom, the Southern Caribbean built a conservation vocation that is now central to its identity. The creation of Parque Nacional Cahuita, to the north, protected one of Costa Rica's few coral reefs, and that of the Refugio Nacional de Vida Silvestre Gandoca-Manzanillo, to the south, in 1985, put under protection a long strip of jungle, mangroves, wetlands and coast reaching to the border with Panama, where sea turtles nest and an extremely rich biodiversity thrives.
In this setting of jungle running down to the sea, wildlife became an attraction in itself, and rescue and environmental education projects appeared. The Jaguar Rescue Center, founded in Playa Chiquita, became one of the best-known wildlife rehabilitation centers in the country, working above all with injured or orphaned sloths, monkeys, birds and reptiles, with the aim of returning them to the wild. Botanical gardens, butterfly houses and organic cacao farms round out a nature offer closely tied to the local community.
So, in a few decades, Cocles and Chiquita went from remote spots of fishers and cacao growers to a destination that combines beach, surf, Afro-Caribbean food and a strong conservation streak. That mix —culture, nature and an unhurried pace of life— is what defines this corner of the Costa Rican Caribbean today and sets it apart from the rest of the country.