La Fortuna - Home of the Arenal Volcano

Our journey continued to La Fortuna. Here is the most active and youngest volcano in Costa Rica - the Arenal Volcano. The small town of La Fortuna is therefore the starting point for national park hikes as well as visits to natural hot springs, which are heated by the volcano's lava. There are also waterfalls and Lake Arenal.

After a very exhausting drive, we arrived in La Fortuna quite late and decided to go on excursions the next day.

Our first excursion took us to a coffee/cocoa plantation, where we had an in-depth tour of the entire coffee and chocolate production process. Here we saw a sloth again and this time I managed to take a photo with its head. :D
After the tour, we went to free hot springs to relax (there are numerous natural thermal baths and resorts, which are commercially developed). There you have the opportunity to bathe in a river in the middle of the jungle (about 40°C water temperature) and relax in the natural stone pools.

The next day we took a tour to the national park, where we went on a suspension bridge walk. Unfortunately, we didn't see as many animals as expected, but the view from the suspension bridges into the rainforest and onto the Arenal Volcano was breathtaking. By the way, we were lucky once again: previously, we had only met people who did not have the luck to see the volcano during their stay in La Fortuna, as it was always hidden in the clouds. We were able to see it almost completely several times (only the top was missing).

On the last day, we did spa activities and visited one of the commercial thermal baths - here the water in the approximately 25 pools was warm between 20°C and 60°C. We did not think that bathwater could also be too hot. In the 60°C warm pool, we could only go in slowly and only immerse small parts of the body at the same time.

Meanwhile, we are in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast - more about that in a few days. ;)