Where should I eat in Arenal, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

A soda is a small, family-run eating house, and it is the category rather than any single address that matters in La Fortuna, the town that serves Arenal Volcano National Park. The casado it serves is a fixed shape with a variable protein — grilled chicken, fish, or stewed beef — and it is built around the same rice and black beans that appear at breakfast as gallo pinto.

Two other things are worth ordering by name. Chifrijo layers rice, beans, fried pork and pico de gallo in a bowl, with tortilla chips to scoop it. Olla de carne is a long-simmered beef broth with whole chunks of yuca, plantain, chayote and corn — a highland dish rather than a coastal one, and better in the cool, wet northern zone than on either beach.

To drink, agua dulce is made by dissolving tapa de dulce, a hard cake of unrefined cane sugar, in hot water or milk. Fruit frescos are the other default: cas, a sharply acidic small guava, and guanábana are the two that do not exist as supermarket juices anywhere a visitor is likely to live.

The park's clock, not the kitchens', sets the shape of the day. Arenal Volcano National Park runs from 8:00 to 16:00, so the natural pattern is an early breakfast, trails through the middle of the day, and a proper meal in town afterwards. The park's own rules prohibit bonfires and require visitors to carry their rubbish out, so cooking inside is not an option and a packed lunch has to leave with you.

La Fortuna sits low on the volcano's eastern side, where the air is warm and heavy, and the sodas are open-fronted with fans rather than glass. Rain arrives most afternoons outside the dry months and the town's terraces empty for twenty minutes at a time.

The gate is card-only. The tourism board's park sheet states that entrance tickets are paid by credit or debit card, with no cash accepted — while the smallest sodas in town are the places most likely to want colones. Carrying both, rather than choosing, is the practical answer. Entry to the park also requires a passport or identity document, so the document you leave at the hotel is the one that ends the day early.

• Before 8:00 — Gallo pinto and agua dulce in town, early enough to be at the park gate when it opens.
• Early afternoon — Back in La Fortuna for a casado, after the morning's walking and before the usual afternoon rain.
• Evening — Chifrijo or olla de carne, the second of which rewards the cooler, wetter side of the cordillera the town sits on.

Nothing inside the national park is open after 16:00, so a late lunch has to be a town lunch. Costa Rica requires a yellow fever vaccination certificate from travelers arriving from certain countries in South America or Africa, and the US Department of State advises exercising increased caution in Costa Rica due to crime. Leaving the country by air carries a US$29 departure tax, usually already in the airfare — worth knowing before you spend your last colones on dinner.

See the when-to-visit answer in this group for the dry-season window, and the things-to-do answer for the park's published trail distances and walking times.