Manuel Antonio National Park Tours: Guided Wildlife Walks

Manuel Antonio National Park covers a short stretch of Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast, about 7 km south of the port town of Quepos: rainforest, beaches, a headland that was once an island and a dozen islets offshore. It is the country’s most visited national park, with close to half a million visits a year on less than 2,000 hectares of land. The park exists because local people wanted their beaches back. Law 5100 created it in 1972, after foreign landowners had shut Costa Ricans off the shore.

This site is an independent guide. Park entry tickets are sold only by SINAC, Costa Rica’s national parks agency, on its own website. The tours we list are run by private operators and sold through GetYourGuide.

The walk we recommend is Steve Tours Costa Rica’s guided tour: about two hours with a naturalist and a spotting scope, rated 4.8 from 2,195 reviews and from about $27 on the booking platform when we checked. Every option except the budget one includes your park ticket, and you send each traveller’s passport details after booking. The listing doesn’t promise any particular animal, and nobody can.

See dates for the park walk →

Tickets: online only, from SINAC

SINAC sells every ticket through its website, serviciosenlinea.sinac.go.cr, and there is no ticket booth at the gate. Each ticket is for a set date and entry time, and it carries the visitor’s name and passport number. When we checked in October 2026, a foreign adult paid $18.08, which is $16 plus Costa Rica’s 13% VAT. A child aged 2 to 12 paid $5.65, and under-twos go free.

A few rules catch people out. One account can make one purchase a day for Manuel Antonio, of up to six tickets. SINAC doesn’t give refunds. Your ticket carries an entry time and SINAC expects you to arrive within it; the last entries are in the early afternoon. A ticket is valid once, so leaving and coming back means buying another.

Since May 2024 the park has admitted up to 2,501 visitors a day, and busy days sell out, above all over Christmas, New Year and Easter week. Buy as soon as your dates are fixed, especially between mid-December and April. Several private websites have park-like names; SINAC’s own is the address above.

You can also hand the whole job to an operator. On a walk with the ticket included, the operator buys it for you once you send each traveller’s details. Steve Tours (on every option except the budget one), Mystique Nature Tours, Nature Walks Costa Rica and Tucanes Tours’ full day from Jacó all include it. Xplore Manuel Antonio and Nature Adventures by Guach sell their walks with or without it, and the private walk on this site expects you to hold your own. Whichever you choose, bring the passport whose number is on the ticket, because rangers check ID against it at the gate. Manuel Antonio National Park tickets covers the purchase in more detail.

Closed every Tuesday

The park is closed every Tuesday, all year. Some older pages and blogs still say Monday; SINAC’s own park page says Tuesday. On the other six days it opens at 7 am, the beaches are cleared from 3 pm, and everyone is out by 4 pm. Public holidays are normal open days unless SINAC closes the park for weather or another risk.

Over the holidays, the closed days in December are the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th. Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are both Fridays this season, so the park is open on each, tickets permitting.

Keep the Tuesday for something that doesn’t need the park: a boat trip, the mangroves or a rest.

Do you need a guide?

No. Anyone with a SINAC ticket can walk the signed trails. On your own you can find capuchins, iguanas and agoutis without much trouble. Sloths are another matter. They camouflage well and make almost no movement or noise, so they are easy to walk past, and snakes and frogs are harder still.

That is what a guide is for. Every walk inside the park on this site lists a spotting scope or similar optics, and guests photograph the animals through it with their phones; several operators send their own photos afterwards. Each of the seven park walks has a review in our data from a guest who says the guide found animals they would have missed. “Without him we wouldn’t have find the animals,” one wrote of a Steve Tours walk in September 2026.

Ask for a guide with an ICT credential, the licence the Costa Rican Tourism Board issues. Several operators here say their guides hold it. They are private companies, though, not park staff.

So the answer depends on why you’re going. If the animals are the point, book a guide. If you mostly want the beaches and a walk in the forest, a ticket will do. Do you need a guide in Manuel Antonio? goes further into the choice.

Seven walks inside the park

They share more than their titles suggest. Most give about two hours on the trails, every guide carries a scope, each walk finishes with time on a beach, and all of them are offered in English and Spanish. What differs is the ticket, and where you meet.

Steve Tours Costa Rica has the most reviews of any walk here, 2,195 at an average of 4.8. The ticket is included on every option except the budget one, and a private option adds fruit and drinks. The meeting point depends on the option you book, and transport and parking are not included.

Xplore Manuel Antonio is rated 4.9 from 1,506 reviews and starts from about $26, sold with or without the ticket. Its guides meet at Supermarket Joseth, next to Chalo parking, just before the park entrance. Arrive five to ten minutes early, because the group waits ten minutes at most. Photos come by AirDrop, WhatsApp or email afterwards.

Mystique Nature Tours, rated 4.8 from 582 reviews and from about $25, is the only walk here that states a group size: two to ten people, or private. The ticket is included, and you send each traveller’s full name, passport number and nationality through the booking platform’s chat. Walks leave the operator’s office, 50 m before the entrance, at 7:50 am or noon, and the listing adds a newer 7 am start.

Nature Adventures by Guach (4.9 from 273 reviews, from about $28) meets near the entrance and sends instructions for buying your own ticket, though one of its options includes it. It runs rain or shine and adds a wildlife photo album.

The private walk (4.9 from 154 reviews, from about $38) is for your own group. Bring your own ticket and your own way there: it meets at Chalo parking, less than 50 m from the entrance, stops at the café and finishes on the beach.

Two walks bundle the logistics. Nature Walks Costa Rica (4.6 from 81 reviews, from about $65) includes the ticket and parking, with a certified local guide; its title offers “pick up only or parking”, so check which one your option gives. Tucanes Tours’ full day from Jacó (4.6 from 59 reviews, from about $134) includes transport, breakfast, lunch, soft drinks and the park fee. Its listing calls the drive an hour. Jacó is 71 to 80 km away, so allow an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half each way.

Book the one that fits your trip:

Prices, ratings and review counts from our October 2026 data check; operators use seasonal pricing, so treat them as the shape of the market, not a quote.

For a small group with the ticket bought for you, Mystique’s walk caps its groups at ten.

Trails and beaches

SINAC lists the trails as Catarata, Mirador Punta Serrucho and Punta Catedral, the Perezoso vehicle trail, and the beach trails to Playa Manuel Antonio and Espadilla Sur. None of them is long. The favourite, the Punta Catedral loop, is about a kilometre and a half and was rebuilt in 2024; the headland it circles was once an island, joined to the shore by a sandbar. Most visitors walk the flat main trail in, climb the stairs to the lookout, loop Punta Catedral and finish on the beach. One boardwalk trail is built for wheelchairs, and the Puerto Escondido trail was reported closed in 2025.

Swim at Playa Manuel Antonio, the calmest beach in the park, with the café, showers and changing rooms close by. Espadilla Sur and Gemelas have rip currents. Playa Espadilla Norte, the free public beach outside the gate, is the most dangerous of all and has a record of drownings, so don’t treat it as part of the park.

Half a day covers a guided walk and a swim. Give it a full day, from 7 am until the beaches close at 3 pm, if you want every trail. Manuel Antonio’s trails goes through them one by one.

What you might see

Three monkey species live here: white-faced capuchins, mantled howlers, which you usually hear before you see, and the squirrel monkey, the mono tití, an endangered subspecies found only on Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast. There are no spider monkeys. Two sloths live here too, the brown-throated three-toed and Hoffmann’s two-toed, along with coatis, agoutis, raccoons, white-tailed deer, green iguanas and basilisks. Toucans turn up again and again in reviews, and brown pelicans and the fiery-billed aracari are among the birds named in the park’s management plan.

Snakes are part of it. Guests on two of the day walks and on the night walk listed here met fer-de-lance vipers, so stay on the trail and do what your guide says.

Come early if you can. The animals are most active in the morning, and it’s cooler before about 10 am. Rain doesn’t stop the walks either, and a Steve Tours guest in August 2026 called it “great fun even in the rain”. Nothing is guaranteed, though. What you see depends on the day and some luck.

Food, bags and the people on the road

Rangers check every bag at the entrance. SINAC bans food and drinks in the park, and packaged snacks and single-use plastic get turned back, so leave them behind. Water in a reusable bottle is fine, there are drinking-water fountains on the main trails, and a café inside sells food you may eat only in its own area, between 7:30 am and 3:30 pm. If you arrive with snacks anyway, lockers are open from 7 am to 4 pm; one guest paid $5 for one in January 2026. There are restrooms, changing rooms and showers, but no soap or shampoo is allowed.

The rule has a reason. The capuchins here know a backpack means food, and they can open a zip; raccoons and coatis raid bags as well. Keep yours closed and with you, even on the beach. Pets, alcohol, smoking, umbrellas, balls, tents and hammocks stay outside too.

Real rangers wear SINAC uniforms and work only inside the park. Anyone on the road in a ranger’s shirt selling tickets, offering to guide you or waving you into a car park is not one of them.

Getting there and parking

Manuel Antonio is about three hours’ drive from San José, roughly 175 km: Route 27 west to the coast, then Route 34 south through Parrita to Quepos, and 7 km uphill from there. Allow four to five hours on Friday afternoons and holidays. From Jacó it takes an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, and from Uvita about an hour.

Quepos and Manuel Antonio are not the same place. Quepos is the port town, with the marina, the market and the bus terminal; Manuel Antonio is the hillside strip of hotels and restaurants and the beach area at the park gate. A local bus runs between them about every 15 minutes.

The park has no car park of its own. Private lots near the gate charge about $10 in cash for the day, and on the way in you’ll pass people trying to wave you into theirs. Two of the walks meet by Chalo parking, right at the entrance. Manuel Antonio from San José compares the ways to get there.

After dark and on the water

The national park closes in the afternoon, so night walks around Manuel Antonio take place in private reserves. Xplore Manuel Antonio’s night walk meets at the entrance of Sukia, a private reserve near the park, between 5:30 and 5:55 pm depending on sunset, and lasts two hours. The reserve fee and flashlights are included, with hotel pickup if you choose that option. It isn’t suitable for children under 10, and you need closed shoes. Guests describe frogs, the red-eyed tree frog among them, insects and spiders, bats, a fer-de-lance and a sloth in a tree a couple of metres above the group. It is rated 4.9 from 334 reviews, from about $55.

The mangrove kayak run by Manuel Antonio Experiences isn’t in the park either. It paddles the Isla Damas estuary, about 20 minutes north of Manuel Antonio by road, where trips run at high tide so the narrow channels hold water. Two reviewers in July 2026 found the paddle back against the current the hard part. Guests report monkeys, a baby boa, birds and an American crocodile; the estuary has crocodiles and caimans, not the alligators two reviews mention. Fruit and bottled water are included. The meeting point is shared with other companies, so you need a confirmed booking. It is rated 4.9 from 368 reviews, from about $59.

Night tours in Manuel Antonio covers what you can see after dark.

When to go

On the Pacific side the dry season runs from December to March, with April a transition month, and the rains last from May to October, with November another transition. September and October are the wettest months. The rain falls mostly in the afternoon, though, and SINAC says the park is quietest then; it suggests coming early and dressing for the wet. The busiest times are Christmas and New Year, Easter week (21 to 28 March in 2027) and weekends in the dry season. The best time to visit Manuel Antonio weighs the seasons.

Is it worth it?

It depends what you want from it. The park is small and busy: one guest in August 2026 gave four stars, praising the guide but finding the park “too small, too crowded”. What it gives in return is rainforest wildlife on the walk to a beach, all in a morning. Weekdays are quieter than weekends, and the 7 am opening is when the animals are most active. Is Manuel Antonio National Park worth it? looks at who it suits.

Which walk to book

For most visitors, book the Steve Tours walk with the ticket included, pick a day that isn’t a Tuesday, and stay for a swim. If you already hold a SINAC ticket, Xplore’s walk, rated 4.9 from 1,506 reviews, sells without it. If you’re staying in Jacó without a car, Tucanes Tours’ full day takes care of the driving, the meals and the ticket. Whichever you choose, the guide’s scope is what turns a walk in the forest into a morning of sloths and monkeys, with luck on your side.

Check dates for the park walk →