How to experience Costa Rica—without running from Bear Grylls
There’s no need to rough it like Bear Grylls — Costa Rica’s riches are there for all to enjoy
Ed Grenby - 12 February 2025
Image credit: Netflix
No one needs to drink their own urine at the Four Seasons Resort Peninsula Papagayo. You might think that goes without saying in a hotel where rooms cost £5,000 per night, but it may nonetheless be reassuring to those who’ve been watching Celebrity Bear Hunt on Netflix. In the show, adventurer and ex-SAS man Bear Grylls has set up camp in the jungles of Costa Rica, where he teaches an assortment of A-to-C-listers survival skills – including, yes, the important role your pee can play in keeping you alive – before trying to hunt them down in the wilderness. Holly Willoughby – at a safe distance and dressed down by the usual, glamorous standards of Dancing on Ice – is his co-presenter.
Even with all Grylls’s tripwires and man-traps, however, Costa Rica’s tropical rainforest looks resplendent on-screen, and it’s eminently accessible to those of us who prefer piña coladas to, well, what’s being served at Bear’s bar. The Four Seasons – which, incidentally, is where Grylls stayed during time off from filming (fourseasons.com/costarica) – is just one of many accommodation options in Guanacaste, the coastal province where the show was shot. On my last visit, I took the more affordable route, basing myself just 15 miles up the coast, at the Riu Palace Costa Rica, where you can get seven nights all-inclusive, including flights and transfers, for £1,839 (tui.co.uk).
Image credit: Four Seasons
TIME TO RELAX | Twilight at the Four Seasons hotel in Guanacaste
It was a few days until I could be prised off the lounger; the beaches here, along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, are softly sanded, scalloped coves, the colour of the inside of a Milky Way bar. If you’re fortunate and patient enough, you can watch sea turtles flopping ashore at night to lay their eggs. Alternatively, you can watch surfers doing their thing in the waves – or join them, since board hire and some seriously laid-back tuition can be had at little boho seaside villages, such as Tamarindo for the price of a couple of beers.
Beyond the beaches, around 30 per cent of the country is protected in national parks or wildlife reserves, so you needn’t go far for a taste of the jungle. Just up the road from the Riu Palace, I found Diamante Eco Adventure Park (diamanteecoadventurepark.com) – nothing to trouble Grylls or the more robust participants (Boris Becker, Mel B…), but with its mile-long zip-wires and rugged tracks, possibly enough for some of their less robust camp-mates (Shirley Ballas, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen).
As much as I enjoyed my horse riding and kayaking there, I wanted something a bit wilder. Through the TUI reps at the hotel, I organised a hike in Tenorio Volcano National Park (visitcostarica.com), including a trip to the tantalizingly blue pool at the foot of the Rio Celeste waterfall, a walk amongst the highest boughs of the cloud forest at Monteverde and white water rafting on the River Tenorio – where the howler monkeys laughed openly at me from their bank-side grandstand in the ceiba trees as I was pinged out of the raft for the fourth or fifth time. At Monteverde the highlight wasn’t – as you might expect – the place’s famous ‘sky bridges’ (skyadventures.travel), wobbly footbridges suspended at treetop-height across deep green gorges, but the initially more boring-sounding nature walk. Our guide, José, seemed to be able to summon animal sightings like a sorcerer, pointing out such exotically named critters as the tink frog, cat-eyed snake and blue morpho. The latter is a butterfly, even more iridescently azure than that Rio Celeste waterfall pool – enchanting as it flitted around using the woods, but actually magical later in the park’s butterfly house when one landed on my finger, like I was a passing Disney princess. There we could also watch butterflies emerging from their chrysalises and flapping their wings, uncertainly, for the very first time (as if to say ‘Whoa! What the hell are these?!’) before taking their tentative and wobbly maiden flight.
Image credit: Four Seasons
EASY DOES IT | Sloth parenting is a tiring job
The pretty, but a bit useless star of the show, though, is the adorable sloth, so dopey it sometimes mistakes its own arm for a branch and consequently falls out of the tree when it tries to cling on. They are not hard to find in Costa Rica; the legendarily lazy little tree-dweller sleeps up to 18 hours a day, and moves as slowly as molasses when awake anyway. But to glimpse one far away in the forest’s canopy layer is to miss half the fun. In Monteverde’s sloth enclosure, I’m treated to the kind of close-up a Planet Earth cameraman might win a Bafta for, and I watch transfixed as a particularly active sloth (the jungle’s very own Grylls, perhaps) stirs, wakes, yawns, stretches, resettles itself… and dozes off again.
They might not actually be lazy, says José, but merely have a drug problem. The leaves of their favourite tree have a high THC or cannabis-like content, he explains. Suddenly the beatific half-smiles etched permanently on their little pink snouts makes sense – but by this time I’m wearing one myself. And no narcotics were required – Costa Rica, it turns out, provides a wholly natural high.
Image credit: Netflix
No one needs to drink their own urine at the Four Seasons Resort Peninsula Papagayo. You might think that goes without saying in a hotel where rooms cost £5,000 per night, but it may nonetheless be reassuring to those who’ve been watching Celebrity Bear Hunt on Netflix. In the show, adventurer and ex-SAS man Bear Grylls has set up camp in the jungles of Costa Rica, where he teaches an assortment of A-to-C-listers survival skills – including, yes, the important role your pee can play in keeping you alive – before trying to hunt them down in the wilderness. Holly Willoughby – at a safe distance and dressed down by the usual, glamorous standards of Dancing on Ice – is his co-presenter.
Request a holiday brochure from one of our partners
Even with all Grylls’s tripwires and man-traps, however, Costa Rica’s tropical rainforest looks resplendent on-screen, and it’s eminently accessible to those of us who prefer piña coladas to, well, what’s being served at Bear’s bar. The Four Seasons – which, incidentally, is where Grylls stayed during time off from filming (fourseasons.com/costarica) – is just one of many accommodation options in Guanacaste, the coastal province where the show was shot. On my last visit, I took the more affordable route, basing myself just 15 miles up the coast, at the Riu Palace Costa Rica, where you can get seven nights all-inclusive, including flights and transfers, for £1,839 (tui.co.uk).
Image credit: Four Seasons
TIME TO RELAX | Twilight at the Four Seasons hotel in Guanacaste
It was a few days until I could be prised off the lounger; the beaches here, along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, are softly sanded, scalloped coves, the colour of the inside of a Milky Way bar. If you’re fortunate and patient enough, you can watch sea turtles flopping ashore at night to lay their eggs. Alternatively, you can watch surfers doing their thing in the waves – or join them, since board hire and some seriously laid-back tuition can be had at little boho seaside villages, such as Tamarindo for the price of a couple of beers.
Beyond the beaches, around 30 per cent of the country is protected in national parks or wildlife reserves, so you needn’t go far for a taste of the jungle. Just up the road from the Riu Palace, I found Diamante Eco Adventure Park (diamanteecoadventurepark.com) – nothing to trouble Grylls or the more robust participants (Boris Becker, Mel B…), but with its mile-long zip-wires and rugged tracks, possibly enough for some of their less robust camp-mates (Shirley Ballas, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen).
Request a holiday brochure from one of our partners
As much as I enjoyed my horse riding and kayaking there, I wanted something a bit wilder. Through the TUI reps at the hotel, I organised a hike in Tenorio Volcano National Park (visitcostarica.com), including a trip to the tantalizingly blue pool at the foot of the Rio Celeste waterfall, a walk amongst the highest boughs of the cloud forest at Monteverde and white water rafting on the River Tenorio – where the howler monkeys laughed openly at me from their bank-side grandstand in the ceiba trees as I was pinged out of the raft for the fourth or fifth time. At Monteverde the highlight wasn’t – as you might expect – the place’s famous ‘sky bridges’ (skyadventures.travel), wobbly footbridges suspended at treetop-height across deep green gorges, but the initially more boring-sounding nature walk. Our guide, José, seemed to be able to summon animal sightings like a sorcerer, pointing out such exotically named critters as the tink frog, cat-eyed snake and blue morpho. The latter is a butterfly, even more iridescently azure than that Rio Celeste waterfall pool – enchanting as it flitted around using the woods, but actually magical later in the park’s butterfly house when one landed on my finger, like I was a passing Disney princess. There we could also watch butterflies emerging from their chrysalises and flapping their wings, uncertainly, for the very first time (as if to say ‘Whoa! What the hell are these?!’) before taking their tentative and wobbly maiden flight.
Image credit: Four Seasons
EASY DOES IT | Sloth parenting is a tiring job
The pretty, but a bit useless star of the show, though, is the adorable sloth, so dopey it sometimes mistakes its own arm for a branch and consequently falls out of the tree when it tries to cling on. They are not hard to find in Costa Rica; the legendarily lazy little tree-dweller sleeps up to 18 hours a day, and moves as slowly as molasses when awake anyway. But to glimpse one far away in the forest’s canopy layer is to miss half the fun. In Monteverde’s sloth enclosure, I’m treated to the kind of close-up a Planet Earth cameraman might win a Bafta for, and I watch transfixed as a particularly active sloth (the jungle’s very own Grylls, perhaps) stirs, wakes, yawns, stretches, resettles itself… and dozes off again.
They might not actually be lazy, says José, but merely have a drug problem. The leaves of their favourite tree have a high THC or cannabis-like content, he explains. Suddenly the beatific half-smiles etched permanently on their little pink snouts makes sense – but by this time I’m wearing one myself. And no narcotics were required – Costa Rica, it turns out, provides a wholly natural high.