🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Guanacaste (North Pacific)
Playas del Coco, known simply as El Coco, is one of the liveliest and longest-established coastal towns on Guanacaste's North Pacific coast. Set on a wide sheltered bay a short hop from Liberia international airport, it was one of the area's first popular beach resorts and still mixes fishing village with tourist life, food and an active nightlife.
Its great asset is being a strategic base for the sea: the calm bay and the closeness of world-famous dive sites such as the Islas Murciélago and the Islas Catalinas make it one of Costa Rica's main hubs for scuba diving and water sports. Dive boats, sport fishing boats, snorkeling trips and wildlife-watching tours all leave from here, and quieter beaches like Playa Hermosa and Playa Ocotal are minutes away.
This guide covers the essentials of Playas del Coco with a practical eye: what the town and its beach are like, diving and fishing as the big draws, the nightlife and the food, the nearby beaches, how to get here from Liberia and what to keep in mind. El Coco is ideal for anyone after a beach destination with full services, atmosphere and sea, and as a starting point for discovering the rest of the North Pacific coast.
Playas del Coco is one of the oldest and most popular beach resorts on Costa Rica's North Pacific coast, grown out of a fishing village on a sheltered bay on the Carrillo coast. Its closeness to Liberia and the international airport drove its tourist development, turning it into a diving, fishing and nightlife hub from the mid-20th century onward. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The North Pacific province that in 1824 voted to be Costa Rican: land of the sabanero and of tropical dry forest, cradle of the national folklore, home to steaming volcanoes and founding battles, and to the great sun, surf and longevity beaches of the Nicoya Peninsula.
Read the history of Guanacaste →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Playas del Coco was born, like so many settlements along the Guanacaste coast, as a fishing community on a sheltered bay of the North Pacific. The wide inlet, protected by rocky points and with relatively calm water, offered a natural anchorage and access to rich fishing grounds, which encouraged families who lived off the sea to settle here. For a long time, life in El Coco revolved around boats, nets and the rhythm of the tides.
The Guanacaste region, historically more oriented to cattle ranching on the inland plains than to the sea, saw its coasts above all as a fishing resource and a place of recreation for nearby communities. El Coco, thanks to its accessibility and its bay, became early on one of the favorite beach spots for Costa Ricans from the northwest, who came to swim and eat fresh fish long before international tourism arrived.
That fishing origin is still part of the town's identity: even today, alongside the hotels and restaurants, fishers and their boats are part of the scene, and both commercial and sport fishing keep a direct link to the sea that gave rise to the place. Beneath its tourist layer, El Coco keeps the soul of a seafaring village.
Playas del Coco has the distinction of having been one of the first beach destinations to become popular on Costa Rica's North Pacific coast. When sun-and-sand tourism was still in its infancy in Guanacaste, El Coco was already receiving domestic visitors and the first tourists, drawn by its accessible bay and its fledgling services. Being a pioneer gave it the infrastructure and the feel of an established tourist town that many other destinations in the region would only develop decades later.
The great transformation came with the boom in international tourism in Costa Rica and, decisively, with the opening and growth of Liberia's Daniel Oduber International Airport, which brought the North Pacific coast within reach of North American markets. El Coco's proximity to that airport —barely half an hour— made it a natural gateway to the beaches of Guanacaste and reinforced its role as a hub for services and sea-based activities.
Unlike destinations that sprang up entirely out of tourism, El Coco grew on top of a pre-existing town, which gives it a particular mix: a beach resort with a life of its own, local commerce, a fishing community and, at the same time, an intense tourist offering. That combination of real town and beach destination defines its character.
Over time, El Coco found its great tourist calling in the deep sea. Its strategic location facing some of the best dive sites in the country made it one of Costa Rica's main scuba diving hubs. The nearby Islas Catalinas, known for their gatherings of manta rays, and the Islas Murciélago (Bat Islands), inside the Área de Conservación Guanacaste and famous for bull shark sightings, are the destinations of the trips that leave its bay every day.
At the same time, the North Pacific coast established itself as one of the world's great sport fishing grounds, rich in sailfish, marlin, mahi-mahi and tuna. El Coco joined in as a departure port for the fishing fleet, with the growing practice of catch and release for billfish. Diving and fishing gave the town an identity tied to the open sea that goes well beyond its beach.
Today Playas del Coco combines that marine prominence with a lively town life, seafood cooking and a notable nightlife that set it apart within Guanacaste. It's a destination that has managed to reinvent itself from its fishing roots into a complete base for exploring the North Pacific sea, without entirely losing the character of the old fishing village it grew out of.
Behind the seafaring town beats the deep history of Guanacaste, one of Costa Rica's culturally richest regions. Before the Spanish conquest, the country's northwest —including the coast of the canton of Carrillo where El Coco lies— was inhabited by the Chorotega, a people with Mesoamerican roots who came from the north and developed maize agriculture, refined polychrome pottery and a system of chiefdoms. That legacy survives in the pottery of villages such as Guaitil and San Vicente, where pre-Columbian techniques are still used.
After the conquest, the region was for centuries part of the governorship of Nicaragua and lived off the great cattle haciendas. From that world of savannas and cattle came the figure of the sabanero (the Guanacaste cowboy), the marimba, the traditional dances and a cultural identity of its own that still sets Guanacaste apart from the rest of the country, with its music, its food and its character.
A decisive milestone was the Annexation of the Partido de Nicoya: on 25 July 1824, the people of Nicoya —then under Nicaraguan influence— decided by popular will to join Costa Rica, under the motto 'De la patria por nuestra voluntad' ('To the homeland by our own will'). That act added this whole region to the country and is celebrated every year as a national holiday. Knowing this history reveals that, beyond the diving and the nightlife, El Coco and its coast are part of one of the oldest and best-loved cultural traditions in Costa Rica.
If Playas del Coco is synonymous with diving today, it's because of what lies below the water, not above it. The gray-sand bay isn't especially striking, but it opens the door to two of the most celebrated dive sites in the American Pacific. The first are the Islas Catalinas, a string of rocky islets half an hour away by boat, where between November and May giant Pacific manta rays gather —creatures that can exceed four meters across— drawn by the upwelling of cold, plankton-rich water caused by the Papagayo winds of the dry season. Alongside them swim eagle rays, turtles, moray eels, whitetip reef sharks and huge schools of fish: a spectacle that made El Coco a must-stop on the world diving circuit.
The second, farther out and for advanced divers only, are the Islas Murciélago (Bat Islands), at the far north of the country, inside the Área de Conservación Guanacaste and Santa Rosa National Park. There, mainly between May and November, one of the planet's few reliable encounters with the bull shark in its habitat takes place: deep dives, in current, an hour from the coast, reserved for those with PADI Advanced certification and recent experience. That combination —accessible mantas at Catalinas, sharks for experts at Murciélago— turned the town into Guanacaste's diving capital and filled its main street with dive shops, many operating since the 1990s.
That underwater heritage, however, is not guaranteed. Ocean warming and El Niño events cause coral bleaching; illegal shark finning was an open wound in Costa Rica for years; and tourist pressure on the dive sites demands management. The country has responded by protecting these waters within its conservation areas, regulating diving and banning harmful practices, and a good share of El Coco's operators now work with sustainability and environmental education in mind. Understanding that world beneath the surface —the mantas, the sharks and their fragility— is understanding how an old gray-sand fishing village ended up as one of the great names in diving in Central America.