Mal País

“Worth timing for the last hour of daylight”

Mal País occupies the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula where the paved road ends and the landscape becomes rocky, the coastline wild, and the infrastructure minimal. The beach is not the white-sand postcard of the northern Guanacaste resorts but a dark volcanic rock and sand mixture punctuated by tide pools that expose sea urchins, anemones, hermit crabs, and ochre starfish at low water. The surf at the southern point breaks over a reef that produces a consistent right-hander during the dry season swell. The town is a single road with surf shops, small restaurants, and the kind of accommodation that requires accepting that the wi-fi may not work. The bohemian character of the place — which attracted a community of expatriates and surf travellers beginning in the 1990s — has been preserved partly by the difficulty of the access and partly by the rocky terrain that makes large-scale resort construction impractical. Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve is twelve kilometres south.