Things to do at Arenal Volcano National Park

Arenal Volcano National Park, established in 1991 and covering roughly 120 square kilometres of the Arenal-Tempisque conservation area, protects a near-perfectly conical stratovolcano rising to 1,670 metres.

Its eruption on 29 July 1968 destroyed the villages of Tabacon, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luis and killed around 87 people, then the volcano stayed in near-continuous activity for 42 years. That activity stopped in October 2010, and Arenal has been dormant ever since: there is no visible lava today, day or night, whatever an old brochure or a guide's script implies.

What you actually get here is the cone itself, often free of cloud in the early morning, solidified lava fields from past eruptions to walk across, and the geothermal heat still feeding the region's hot springs.