Manuel Antonio

Declared in 1972 after a public campaign to stop its beaches being privatised, it is one of the smallest national parks in the world but also one of the most visited in Costa Rica, thanks to the unusual combination of tropical rainforest running literally down to white sand beaches. It protects one of the last populations of the Central American squirrel monkey, a tiny primate endemic to the country's central Pacific coast and listed as endangered, whose total population is estimated at a few thousand animals spread across forest fragments increasingly isolated by the tourist development around them.