Cocos Island

Declared a national park in 1978 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, Cocos Island is nicknamed the Galápagos of Central America for its oceanic isolation — over 500 km from the Costa Rican mainland — and its very high endemism. Its waters hold one of the greatest documented concentrations of hammerhead shark on the planet, which gather in schools of several hundred around the nearby seamounts, a spectacle that has made the island one of the most coveted and least accessible dive destinations in the world, reachable only after 30 to 36 hours of sailing from the mainland. Its landscape of waterfalls dropping straight into the sea was a visual inspiration for the fictional island of Jurassic Park.