Santa Rosa National Park (Costa Rica)
Santa Rosa National Park, the first national park established in Costa Rica, was initially created to protect the site of the Battle of Santa Rosa. Today it protects some of the world's last remaining tropical dry forests. It is part of the Area de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site.
Santa Rosa National Park
Santa Rosa National Park, the first national park established in Costa Rica, was initially created to protect the site of the Battle of Santa Rosa.
The National Park covers 49,515 ha (122,354 acres) and protects some of the world's last remaining tropical dry forests.
Santa Rosa National Park lies within the larger national Guanacaste Conservation Area and is part of the Area de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site.
Santa Rosa was originally a farm in northwestern Guanacaste Province. Today an old hacienda building, "La Casona," functions as the monument commemorating the fallen heroes of the different battles that took place here.
The Interamerican Highway (Pan-American Highway) is along its eastern edge, where the adjacent Guanacaste National Park is located.
Guanacaste National Park was created in 1989 to connect Santa Rosa National Park with the high-elevation cloud forest of Orosi and Cacao volcanoes and across the continental divide to the Caribbean rainforest of Northern Costa Rica.
The hope is that together these two parks protect enough land to ensure sufficiently large habitats for wide-ranging species such as jaguars and mountain lions while simultaneously creating a biological corridor for birds and insects to make local seasonal migrations between the dry forest and the evergreen cloud and rain forests.
Ten unique natural habitats are found within the National Park. They include savannas, deciduous forests, marshlands and mangrove woodlands. In addition, areas of the Isthmian-Pacific moist forest ecoregion and moist Pacific Coast mangrove ecoregion habitats are protected here.
Fauna includes coyotes, peccaries, white-nosed coatis, Baird's tapirs, sea turtles, and terrestrial turtles. Three monkey species in the protected area are Geoffroy's spider monkey, mantled howler and white-headed capuchin. Several cat species are also present: jaguarundi, ocelot, cougar and jaguar, though they are rarely seen.
There are two crucial sea turtle nesting beaches in the National Park: Naranjo and Nancite.