The boat cuts its engine fifty meters offshore, and you wade through warm water onto dark sand stippled with driftwood. Behind you, the Pacific rolls in unbroken sets; ahead, primary rainforest rises in a wall of green so dense it seems solid. Then you hear it: the Llorona waterfall, its voice growing louder as you walk the shoreline, until you round a rocky outcrop and see the cascade spilling over moss-covered stone directly onto the beach.
“One of the only beaches in Central America where a substantial waterfall meets the ocean, framed by undisturbed primary rainforest.”
Credit: UnsplashCrashing wave at sunset on the shoreline
Tapir tracks indent the wet sand near the waterfall's plunge pool, crossing your path and disappearing into the understory. The air tastes of salt and earth and something sweeter—rotting mangoes, maybe, or the sap of a bleeding trunk somewhere in the canopy. Scarlet macaws erupt from a beachside almond tree, their calls echoing off the forest wall.
You rinse the salt from your skin in the waterfall's cold current while the Pacific pounds ten meters away. Hermit crabs drag their borrowed shells across the sand. A white hawk perches on a bleached log, watching the tide bring in Portuguese man o' war. By afternoon, when the boat returns, your footprints are the only human marks on this entire stretch of coast—and the incoming tide is already erasing them.
