What should a first-time traveler see in Costa Rica beyond the obvious highlights?

Costa Rica's World Heritage list reads like a corrective to its tourist map. The four properties are Cocos Island National Park, far out in the Pacific; Área de Conservación Guanacaste in the dry northwest; the Talamanca Range-La Amistad Reserves together with La Amistad National Park, straddling the Panamanian border; and the Precolumbian Chiefdom Settlements with Stone Spheres of the Diquís, the country's only cultural inscription, in the southern Pacific lowlands. Not one of them appears in a standard first-timer's loop, and the stone spheres in particular have no equivalent anywhere — carved granodiorite spheres associated with chiefdom settlements, listed as a cultural property rather than a natural one.

The second thing a first-timer misses is that much of the best forest is privately held. The Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve covers 4,125 hectares and was created on 6 October 1972; it is the property of the Centro Científico Tropical, a private non-governmental organization, and forms part of that body's Sistema de Reservas Privadas. It takes roughly 100,000 visitors a year. A national park pass means nothing there, because it is not a national park.

The third is the corridor idea. The reserve's management plan describes the Pájaro Campana Biological Corridor, which reaches up to 1,830 meters and contains 11 life zones — a continuous band of habitat linking the highlands down toward the Gulf of Nicoya rather than a single protected block. Travel along that gradient and you pass through more distinct forest types in a day than most countries contain. For contrast, Arenal Volcano National Park spans 500 to 1,633 meters all by itself.

The Guanacaste northwest is seasonally dry forest: trees that drop their leaves in February and stand gray and bare over cracked ground, which is nothing like the postcard rainforest. The Talamanca range, at the other end of the country, is cold, wet and high, with cloud sitting in the valleys for days.

Cocos Island is the one World Heritage property that cannot be fitted into an ordinary itinerary at all. It lies far offshore in the Pacific and is reached only by multi-day liveaboard boat, which makes it a trip in itself rather than a stop. Knowing that in advance saves travelers from building a route around a property they will never reach, and redirects the ambition toward Guanacaste or the Diquís sites, both of which are drivable.

• Northwest — Área de Conservación Guanacaste, where the dry forest's leafless season is its most photogenic one.
• Highlands — Monteverde's 4,125-hectare private reserve, and the biological corridor that climbs to 1,830 meters around it.
• South — The Diquís stone sphere settlements, the only cultural property on Costa Rica's World Heritage list.

These places are spread across the full length of the country and the roads between them are mountainous. The US Department of State advises exercising increased caution in Costa Rica due to crime. US citizens may stay under 180 days without a visa but must hold a return ticket, and a passport has to be valid for the period of the stay; a yellow fever certificate is required from travelers arriving from certain countries in South America or Africa. La Amistad is transboundary with Panama, so a visit to its Panamanian side is a border crossing, not a day trip.

The trip-planning answer in this group turns this into a workable two-week route; the when-to-visit answer explains how the dry season affects Arenal and the cloud forest differently.