Good food -especially seafood- as well as the well-known carnivals held each summer, and the warmth of its people, are some of the nice surprises expecting tourists visiting this province.

Climate: Being Costa Rica's largest province (11,277 sq. km.), Puntarenas includes practically all of the climate regimes found in this small, but tremendously varied, country. From tropical dry forest to rain forest, and from mangrove swamp to cloud forest to subalpine paramo, this sprawling province contains at least a little bit of everything. Puntarenas Costa Rica

Although the entire province lies on the Pacific side of the continental divide, much of its land area is not as severely affected by the annual dry season as is most of Guanacaste province (just to the north on the same side of the country). Puntarenas This is due to the topography's effect on the prevailing winds. The northeast trade winds that come in off the Caribbean Sea are to some extent blocked by the higher mountains of the Central Volcanic and Talamanca Cordilleras before they reach much of the province (from the Carara Biological Reserve south); and once on the Pacific side, the turbulence formed in the passage results in a vortex, or reverse flow of air currents, that actually can draw in moist air from the Pacific Ocean and produce scattered rain showers even during the dry season. These occasional rains and associated high humidity keep the forested portions of the southern coastal areas (e.g., Manuel Antonio and Corcovado National Parks ) green throughout the year, though some species of trees do briefly drop their leaves in response to the drier conditions from January through April.

In the interior sections of the province that reach up to the ridgeline, luxuriant cloud forests exist owing to the mists that sweep across the mountaintops when the tradewinds' full effect is felt from December through February. Yet it is saddening to see how deforestation has advanced up the steep hillsides, in large part aided by the ease of burning the natural vegetation during the dry months of March and April.

History: The peculiar shape of Puntarenas province has a very sensible explanation. During the first 350 years of Spanish presence in Central America, the southern Pacific portion of what is now Costa Rica remained quite isolated from the developing population centers of the region. The high mountains between this area and the Central Valley presented a formidable barrier to the available means of terrestrial transportation. Thus, the few early settlers that ventured into the southern region came either from Panama to the south, or by boat from the port of Caldera in the Gulf of Nicoya .Puntarenas Costa Rica

The dimensions of the province are due to the fact that it includes all the many kilometers of coastline from the Gulf of Nicoya south to Panama , the large inland valleys of Coto Brus and El General, and the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula -- all areas that were once most easily approached by sea.

Despite the use of the Gulf of Nicoya as an entryway to Costa Rica 's inland territory, the port of Puntarenas was not developed until 1840 when coffee production in the highlands reached exportable volumes. Originally, the coffee was brought to port in oxcarts via a trail through the mountains. In 1879, a stretch of railroad track was completed which connected Puntarenas with the town of Esparza (one of the country's earliest Spanish settlements, founded in 1554, a decade before the Central Valley began to be colonized) where the oxcart trail came out of the mountains. Eventually, the railroad was built all the way through to San José and service was inaugurated in 1910.

With the railroad connection to the Central Valley , the Pacific port's activities continued to be a major part of the region's economy throughout the 20th century. However, due to the aging and deterioration of the port facilities and the need to accommodate the much larger vessels of modern shipping fleets, a new port was constructed in the 1980's to the south of Puntarenas. The site chosen was Caldera, where ships had anchored during colonial times.

Prior to the Spaniards' arrival, the area that is now Puntarenas province was home to numerous groups of native peoples with varied lifestyles depending on the habitats in which they lived. The coastal inhabitants were no strangers to the sea and ventured out into open water either in dugouts or in balsa wood rafts. In addition to fish, they harvested other marine products such as shellfish (dug from the mudflats at low tide), sea turtles and turtle eggs, Puntarenas, and murex shells from which they obtained a purple dye used in tinting cloth.

The greatest of the Costa Rican pre-Columbian mysteries comes from the southern part of the province, near the towns of Palmar Norte and Palmar Sur, where hundreds of large stone spheres have been found. The largest of these granitic boulders measures 2.5 meters in diameter and weighs 13,000 kg . Many, however, are not much larger than bowling balls. How these nearly perfectly spherical stones were shaped with such precision is still a matter of speculation, as is their usage by the indigenous inhabitants of the region.

Unfortunately, the chance for archeological interpretation of the spheres was forever lost when the aforementioned area was converted into banana plantations and bulldozers moved the stones from where they had been placed long ago by the natives.Puntarenas Costa Rica

Settlement of the southern sector of the province was slow in coming, despite periodic expeditions into the region during colonial times. Thus, this area, together with the eastern slopes of the Talamanca Cordillera, was one of the last strongholds of indigenous culture in Costa Rica .

Not until 1870 was a horse trail put through from the Central Valley to the Valley of El General. However, given the difficulty in traveling to this new frontier, colonization did not immediately follow the construction of this trail. In fact, the southern part of Puntarenas province remained sparsely populated by non-natives until the mid-1930's when banana plantations in the Caribbean lowlands were severely affected by a fungal infection known as " Panama disease" leading the United Fruit Co. to abandon those areas and look for somewhere to begin new plantations.

The heat and high rainfall of the southern Pacific lowlands made for an ideal banana-growing climate (again, as in the Caribbean , at the expense of vast areas of tropical rain forest), and so it was that between 1936 and 1955 this area experienced an unprecedented wave of human impact.

Ports were built in the banana company towns of Quepos and Golfito for the purpose of shipping the fruit to markets. The construction of the PanAmerican Highway from San José to Panama in the 1940's further opened the region to agricultural colonization by independent Costa Rican farmers.

In the mid-1950's, disease in the banana plantations again caused serious problems for the local economies that were dependent on the production of this crop. Along the coast to the north and south of Quepos, the banana company actually destroyed the banana plantations and converted them to fields of African oil palm. These are still active today (and still expanding) and produce a vegetable oil used in cooking as well as oils used in cosmetics.

An important aspect of the provincial economy today is tourism. The country's most popular beach resorts, Puntarenas (including Doña Ana and Barranca beaches), Jacó, and Manuel Antonio, are all found in this province, as are 14 national parks and reserves -- more than in any other province.Puntarenas Costa Rica