🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Central Pacific
Quepos is a seaside town with two souls. On one hand it's an authentic fishing port, with its banana history and its everyday life far from the tourist gloss; on the other, it's the gateway to one of the most visited places in Costa Rica: Manuel Antonio National Park, that jewel of white-sand beaches, jungle and monkeys barely seven kilometers away. Between those two worlds, Quepos has become an ideal base for exploring the Central Pacific.
Its great modern landmark is Marina Pez Vela, a first-class marina from which the sport fishing boats that gave Quepos worldwide fame set out: sailfish, marlin, dorado, tuna and wahoo are the quarry here, in one of the best fishing grounds in the country. Around the marina there are restaurants, bars and shops that liven up the sunset. And a few kilometers away the road climbs toward Manuel Antonio, lined with hotels, lookouts and jungle where monkeys cross overhead on the cables.
This guide gathers the practical side of making the most of Quepos and its surroundings: how to get there from San José or Jacó, how to visit Manuel Antonio with its official fee and hours, what to expect from sport fishing and other activities, and what prices are real for lodging and food. Quepos is the place to combine first-rate nature, the sea and a Costa Rican town with a character of its own.
The name Quepos comes from the quepoa, an Indigenous people who lived on this stretch of the Central Pacific before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. During the colonial era the area was left almost empty. The great leap came in the 20th century with bananas: in the 1930s the United Fruit Company set up enormous plantations in the region and turned Quepos into a banana export port, with a dock, a railway and a life tied to the company. When Panama disease hit the banana crop, the plantations were largely converted to African oil palm, which still dominates the farming landscape around the town. From the 1970s on, and above all with the creation of Manuel Antonio National Park in 1972, tourism became the area's new engine. Quepos went from banana port to tourist base and sport fishing capital of the Pacific, a role reinforced with the opening of the modern Marina Pez Vela. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The country's longest coastal province, from the Central Pacific to the deep south: from the historic coffee port of Puntarenas to the cloud forests of Monteverde, from the beaches of Manuel Antonio to the wild jewel of the Osa Peninsula and Corcovado, 'the most biologically intense place on Earth'.
Read the history of Puntarenas →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Behind the name of one of the most famous tourist destinations in Costa Rica lies a vanished people: the quepoa. Almost no trace of them is left, except the most lasting of all —the word 'Quepos'—, but they were the first to inhabit this strip of the Central Pacific, long before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, long before United Fruit's bananas or the fishing charters. The quepoa (or quepo) were part of the country's mosaic of native peoples and lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and farming on this coast of jungle, rivers and mangroves.
With the Spanish conquest and colonization, the region's Indigenous population was decimated by disease, displacement and the colonial system, as happened across much of the country. Through the long colonial period the Central Pacific was left almost empty and outside the great centers of power, which were concentrated in the Central Valley.
For centuries this coast stayed remote and hard to reach, covered in forest and edged with mangroves, with only a few scattered settlers. The name 'Quepos', inherited from that native people, remained one of the few visible traces of those who lived on this land first.
The great leap in the modern history of Quepos came in the 20th century, with bananas. In the 1930s the United Fruit Company —the powerful American firm that dominated the banana business across much of Central America— set up enormous plantations in the Central Pacific region, around Quepos. The company built infrastructure for export: a dock, railway lines, housing for workers and a whole way of life revolving around the crop.
Quepos thus became a banana port, a productive enclave where economic activity, employment and even social organization were shaped by the company's presence. People came from different parts of the country and the region looking for work, and the town grew at the pace of the fruit exports.
Central Pacific bananas, however, were hit by what was called Panama disease, a fungus that ruined the plantations. As production fell, much of the land was converted to African oil palm, which to this day dominates the farming landscape around Quepos with its endless rows of palms. The banana cycle gave way to the palm one.
The great contemporary transformation of Quepos came with tourism, and its trigger was the creation, in 1972, of Manuel Antonio National Park, barely seven kilometers from the town. Although it is one of the smallest national parks in Costa Rica, Manuel Antonio combines white-sand beaches, tropical jungle that reaches the sea and extraordinarily visible wildlife —white-faced and squirrel monkeys, sloths, iguanas, raccoons and rich birdlife—, which made it one of the most photographed and most visited destinations in the country.
From then on, the area's economy began to shift from bananas and palm toward tourism. Along the road climbing from Quepos to Manuel Antonio, hotels, lodges, restaurants and lookouts appeared, taking advantage of the spectacular views of the jungle and the ocean. The town of Quepos, for its part, established itself as a base for services: cheaper lodging, shops, transport and, above all, the departure point for tours and for sport fishing.
Manuel Antonio became so popular that, to protect its fragile ecosystem, measures were brought in such as a limited daily visitor quota, a weekly closing day (Mondays in low season) and ticket sales exclusively online through SINAC. Today, balancing the park's conservation with the huge tourist demand is one of the region's great challenges.
Alongside nature tourism, Quepos cultivated another calling that brought it international fame: sport fishing. The Pacific waters off Quepos are among the richest in the country for deep-sea fishing, with plenty of sailfish, marlin (blue, black and striped), dorado (mahi-mahi), tuna and wahoo offshore, and roosterfish, snapper and other species inshore. That abundance made Quepos one of the great sport fishing capitals of the Costa Rican Pacific.
The modern symbol of that identity is Marina Pez Vela, a first-class marina opened on the bay of Quepos, with hundreds of berths able to take large boats, along with nautical services, security, fuel and a complex of restaurants, bars and shops. From its docks, charters set out daily to take anglers from all over the world after sailfish and marlin.
Today, Quepos lives off the sum of its two engines: the nature of Manuel Antonio and the sport fishing of the marina, without entirely losing its character as a port town with a banana history. That mix of jungle, sea, fruit and sport makes Quepos a destination with a personality of its own within the Central Pacific, much more than a simple gateway to a famous park.
The move from bananas to African oil palm was not just a change of crop: it reshaped the landscape and the society of the Central Pacific. When the United Fruit Company abandoned bananas in the mid-20th century, the land was replanted with oil palm, and the endless palm groves you see today along the coastal highway are the direct legacy of that conversion. Around oil production, towns tied to agro-industry grew up —among them the old banana 'camps' reconverted— and a working culture that still persists inland in the canton, far from the beaches.
Meanwhile, the coast was going through another transformation. With Manuel Antonio turned into a tourist magnet and sport fishing booming, Quepos began to look toward the sea and toward the foreign visitor. The town filled with sodas, lodgings, tour agencies and shops, and the road climbing to the park filled with hotels and restaurants with a view. Unlike other beach destinations that erased their past, however, Quepos kept its character as a working port: the market, the fishermen, the families who have been in the area for generations.
That contrast is Quepos's personality today. It is at once the gateway to one of the most visited national parks in Latin America and a real Costa Rican town, with its quepoa Indigenous history, its banana scar, its palm groves and its yacht marina. Anyone who arrives looking only for the beaches of Manuel Antonio discovers, almost without meaning to, a place with many more layers: the tourist passes through the hotel strip, but everyday life beats in the streets of the port, where palm oil, the catch of the day and the charters heading out after sailfish all cross paths.
Understanding that double soul —agricultural and tourist, authentic and cosmopolitan— is the key to enjoying Quepos beyond the postcard. It is not a simple stop on the way to Manuel Antonio: it is a crossroads of stories where you can read, in a single place, much of Costa Rica's economic history in the 20th century.