A biologically intense place in Costa Rica
Where is it?
The Corcovado National Park is located on the Peninsula de Osa in the Southwest of Costa Rica, and is part of the Osa Conservation Area. It was established in 1,975, and encompasses an area of 424 km².
Why Corcovado?
Corcovado National Park includes the only remaining old growth wet-forest on the Pacific beaches of Central America. It contains thirteen major ecosystems including lowland rain forests, highland cloud forests, mangrove swamps, and jolillo palm forests, as well as beaches and coastal habitats.
This wilderness is said to be an excellent life laboratory, allowing study of structures and functions of tropical ecosystems and the fine balances on which they fully depend.The humid forests of Corcovado Park are some of the last places that still maintain eco systems of the humid tropical forests in the Central American Pacific Coast, with annual precipitation over five thousand mm.There are about five hundred species of trees in the park, representing a 1/4 of all the tree species in the country. This park provides an habitat to the largest population of Scarlet Macaws in Costa Rica, and is home to at least three hundred other species of birds, hundred forty mammals, a hundred amphibians and reptiles, forty types of freshwater fish, and between 6,000 and 10,000 different types of insects – including over two hundred species of butterflies!National Geographic has described this place as “the most biologically intense place on Earth”.
