Cocos Island: One of Costa Rica’s Seven Wonders

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Cocos Island is a national park of Costa Rica nearly halfway to the Galapagos Islands. Jacques Cousteau described it as the most beautiful island in the world, Costa Ricans declared it one of its Seven Wonders, and it is a finalist as one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Though it is a small island located nearly 350 miles off the Costa Rica Pacific coast, it is world famous for its spectacular scuba diving. Indeed, its waters are filled with fish, porpoises, whales, and sea turtles, and there are sometimes so many sharks, it is often called Shark Island. Experienced scuba divers travel here from across the planet because it is renowned as the greatest place in the world to dive with large sea animals.

The island has been famous for pirates, real and imagined, for centuries. Many people think that Cocos was the inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson’s famous pirate adventure Treasure Island but sometimes real pirates landed there to escape the English fleet and to bury their treasure. Two great treasures, the Devonshire Treasure and the Lima Treasure, worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, may still be buried there.

Cocos Island is also the setting for Michael Crichton’s epic novel—and Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movies—Jurassic Park.

The island is uninhabited except for a few Costa Rica park rangers who are stationed there to protect its waters from poaching. For centuries its isolation protected the island’s rainforest and undersea creatures from exploitation.

Only a few lucky people get to visit Cocos and if you want to go ashore, you will need previous permission from the rangers. Overnight camping is forbidden. But, no matter. As you walk the shores, looking out over the great Pacific, your imagination can soar. You’ll be walking the very shores that famous pirates hid buried treasure and you will not be alone. It is almost as if some of the stones themselves can talk for you are going to find rocks and boulders bearing the inscriptions of past sailors who left their moment of history behind, writing their names, the names of their ships and ports of call, even the dates. Sailors, long gone but not forgotten by the rocks. Like Kilroy, they were here.