ATLAS · WORLD HERITAGE · COSTA RICA
World Heritage Sites in Costa Rica
Costa Rica has 4 sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List — 1 cultural, 3 natural. Below: how they split by type, and the headline sites. From UNESCO’s official list, snapshot 2026-06-22.
By heritage type
Notable sites in Costa Rica
A spread of the country’s heritage — the rarer mixed and natural sites first, then its earliest inscriptions.
The location of this unique site in Central America, where Quaternary glaciers have left their mark, has allowed the fauna and flora of North and South America to interbreed. Tropical rainforests cover most of the area. Four different Indian tribes inhabit this property, which benefits from close…
Shared across: Costa Rica · Panama
Cocos Island National Park, located 550 km off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, is the only island in the tropical eastern Pacific with a tropical rainforest. Its position as the first point of contact with the northern equatorial counter-current, and the myriad interactions between the island an…
The Area de Conservación Guanacaste (inscribed in 1999), was extended with the addition of a 15,000 ha private property, St Elena. It contains important natural habitats for the conservation of biological diversity, including the best dry forest habitats from Central America to northern Mexi…
The property includes four archaeological sites located in the Diquís Delta in southern Costa Rica, which are considered unique examples of the complex social, economic and political systems of the period AD 500–1500. They contain artificial mounds, paved areas, burial sites and, most s…