Discover all you need to know about visiting the BEST National Park in Costa Rica with the kids!
The wildlife in Costa Rica is incredible, and visiting Manuel Antonio with kids has to be on your central America itinerary. 6% of the world’s biodiversity is in Costa Rica. Or as our guide put it, 1 in every 20 species in the world can be found here. Read on for our complete guide to visiting Manuel Antonio with the kids in tow.
Practical info: Getting there and tickets
Manuel Antonio National Park is located around 3 hours drive from San Jose airport. We opted to stayed in Jaco, around half-way between the two. It was cheaper for accommodation, and we landed around midnight so it broke the drive up. Worth noting Jaco does not have pretty beaches and it is a tourist town, but as a base it may be an option for you to explore. I’ll touch on other places we visited from Jaco towards the end of this blog.
The most important thing about visiting Manuel Antonio with kids is to pre-book your tickets to enter the national park itself. This is even the case if you book with the likes of Klook or other similar tour and trip websites. The only place you can buy these tickets is online here. You can’t just rock up and expect to enter!
The site is available in Spanish and English, but you must create an account first to then book tickets. There is also an availability calendar showing options for each 40 minute timed entry session. Whilst there is a specific time to enter, once you are in, you can stay for as long as you want.
Ticket prices for Manuel Antonio are adults $18, children aged 2-12 $6. This is just your basic entry and of course doesn’t include a guide.
To Guide or Not To Guide?
Once you have your tickets you could go and book your guide from Klook or GetYourGuide if you prefer. However, we decided to wait until we arrived at the park. The car park for the entrance is $10 to park but here’s you’ll find plenty of folk offering you guides and often they will include the parking fee in with you guide fee.
Our negotiation started at $150 for a group tour and $200 dollars for a private tour (we were 3 adults and 2 children. In the end we got our 2 hour tour of Manuel Antonio for $135 ($45 per adult) for a private tour including our car parking. The tour included a guide.
Now here’s our biggest tip for visiting Manuel Antonio with kids, or at all! DO NOT TRY TO SAVE MONEY ON SKIPPING THE GUIDE. In complete honesty, we wouldn’t have seen anything without our guide and it was worth every penny. The guides all carry telescopes and even when we had seen the animals through the telescope and then we looked for it on the tree, we still couldn’t see a lot of them! So get a guide!!!
The park itself has good trails for walking – even possibly pushchair friendly. It’s a gravelled dirt trail, but a carrier may be easier. There’s a couple of small hills and our two walked it without issue. There’s even drinking water taps scattered along the path. If you were walking without stopping the trail is around 30minutes to the beach area and you can do a loop in around 1 hour. Obviously it’s all the stopping that means your tour is 2 hours long.
What animals did we see?
Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the wildlife and this really added to the experience. He was always telling us facts about Costa Rica and especially about the wildlife and Manuel Antonio – and he got so excited when he spotted something and set the tripod telescope up for us to see. He was also really great with the kids and he caught video and photos for us on our phones through his telescope – this is also a well-practiced skill! So here’s our wildlife haul….
3 x sloths, including one mum with her baby
2 bats
1 blue butterfly
1 stick bird – we are still in awe how he spotted this
1 rose dragon fly – also not sure how he spotted it
1 Basilisk Lizard (the ones that run on water)
1 lizard
Then on our walk back alone (without a guide) along a different wooden trail, we spotted (and hence don’t know the names):
Some racoon animal
Several Deer
Capybara-espue rodent
Falcons and Pelicans – which are amazing and fill the skies overhead
Manuel Antonio Beach
The guided tour takes you all the way to Manuel Antonio beach area where we opted to stay for a while and so we parted ways from our guide – we could have gone another 20 minutes with him but the kids saw the sea and were desperate for a swim! So, remember to take your swimming gear with you for the hike as it’s the furthest point from the car! We made that mistake so the kids had to manage in their pants!
Other useful information
Other practical things to know:
- No food or drink (except water) is allowed to be taken into the park. There are bag searches on the way in.
- There is one café near the beach – it sells sandwiches and pastries, smoothies and drinks and has a gift shop. Quite amusingly, the café and shop are in a cage – putting the humans behind bars rather than the animals. A sandwich is around £5 so not the cheapest, but could equally have been worse!
- Good footwear is suggested – hiking sandals are fine. Leave the flip flops at home
- The paths are not shaded – plenty of sunscreen required!
- On returning from the beach, we would suggest taking the different path along the wooden walkway (named Sloth walk) – just gives a different view and there are signs scattered along it with facts about the animals.
- There’s a couple of other look out points and view points to head to if you wish – but that’s more hills.
- The park closes strictly at 4pm, so from 3pm expect to be ushered out and away from the beach. This is ahead of the sunset and nighttime hikes. We would suggest booking an entry time at the latest 12noon, we went for 11am and easily filled out time.
- As you leave the park you’ll walk past various stores selling drinks, ice creams and even coconut vendors.
When leaving the park, head back to the main road and there is a long beach for a swim and some bars and restaurants for a drink. This is a different beach to the one in the park and if you left the park at closing time, then you will likely enjoy a great sunset from here before heading off home! You’ll also likely spot some monkeys and maybe if you get too close to the river, some crocodiles.
In all honesty, Costa Rica eclipses Sandakan and Kuching in Borneo on the wildlife front! It definitely lives up to the hype!
