Waterfalls in Costa Rica: 150 Tours Compared by Region

The usual list of waterfalls in Costa Rica ranks them by beauty, which nobody can check. This page ranks them by how you get in. A few have a gate and a ticket, like La Fortuna and Río Celeste. One needs a guide. Several only make sense inside a day tour, and Nauyaca has two entrances that charge very different prices. We read 150 tours across five destinations: the middle half cost roughly 60 to 250 EUR, a typical tour sits in the 120 to 250 EUR band, and the typical day lasts 6 hours. This page sets the falls side by side, with heights and their sources, a map of the bases, a rain calendar for each region and a plain verdict on the falls we do not sell. Each destination has its own page for the detail, and we link to those instead of repeating them. If you read only one table, make it the one that compares the five destinations: it shows what each region sells and what a day there costs.

A note on method. Heights and gate rules below come from park managers, local press or an operator's own page, and each one says which. Where two sources disagree we print both. Tour prices are the provider's listed price on 22 October 2026, per person, private tours included, and ratings are weighted by the number of reviews, so a 5.0 from nine people does not outrank a 4.9 from two thousand. Dates in this page are the dates of the source, never today's. A swimming ban, a closing day or a fee changes more often than a tour price, so check the park's official channel on the day you go, above all for Río Celeste and Rincón de la Vieja, which closed or changed their rules in 2025 and 2026.