waterfalls· Jungle· Photography· Romantic
Cataratas de Montezuma
Three-tier waterfall at the end of a jungle trail twenty minutes from the village
4.7(3 reviews)
Montezuma
Best Time to Go
“Serene in early morning”
About this place
Most visitors to Montezuma see the lower pool and turn back. It is beautiful — a wide green pool beneath a fifteen-metre fall enclosed by fig trees and smooth dark rock — but it is also the most photographed and most populated part of the trail. Above the lower fall, a scramble over wet rock and a short rope section leads to the middle pool, which is smaller, colder, and quieter. Above that, a third pool sits at the top in near-constant solitude, shaded by forest canopy and fed by a narrow ribbon of white water from the upper falls. The village of Montezuma has an atmosphere that is unhurried and slightly removed from the Costa Rica of resorts and tours; the waterfall fits exactly within it. Come on a weekday morning before the day-trip groups arrive from the Papagayo resorts two hours north and the experience is entirely different from what the photographs suggest.
