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Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica
By Nelson Guda
If you are planning to visit Costa Rica we would like you to have the
most extraordinary experience by staying with us at Casa Corcovado. The
lodge is the closest to Corcovado National Park, the last remaining
Pacific lowland rainforest of sustainable size in Central America. Located
on the Osa Peninsula in southwestern Costa Rica, Corcovado is the "crown
jewel" of a world-renowned national park system.
Including thirteen separate ecosystems, almost one hundred species of
trees and nearly four hundred species of birds, Corcovado has been called
"the most biologically intense place on earth" by no less an authority
than the National Geographic Society. Here among the largest trees of
Costa Rica, can be found the densest population of tapirs, jaguars and
scarlet macaws in Meso-America.
Preserving the rainforest is vital because already one-half of the
earth's rainforest has been destroyed at a rate of fifty acres a minute -
an area the size of New York state every year. Gone will be the rainforest
where 25% of our prescription drugs have already been found and where many
others wait to be discovered. The world's first studies of the tropical
forest canopies were done in Corcovado. Because of the astonishing variety
of unknown life forms discovered within these "hidden worlds" the
estimation of life upon this planet had to be increased twenty fold.
Casa Corcovado Jungle Lodge donates a percentage of its sales to
CORCOVADO FOUNDATION, which is a nonprofit organization based in the Osa
Peninsula.
The
geography of the Osa Peninsula is diverse, allowing for many different
habitats and contributing to its spectacular biological wealth. While an
undulating landscape of knife blade ridges and steep, stream-cut ravines
dominate the majority of the peninsula, many other landscapes can also be
found. In the western end of the peninsula, a large uplifted plateau drops
off into the ocean from hundred foot high rocky bluffs. Further to the
North, vast stretches of mangrove swamp surround the
mouth of the Sierpe, a large river that borders the peninsula.
The forests of the Osa Peninsula are generally classified as Lowland
Pacific Rain Forest. Unlike the Caribbean coast which was historically
covered with a long unbroken rain forest, the Pacific coast of Central
America typically receives far less precipitation and has many tropical
dry forests. The west coast from southern Costa Rica through Panama has
rain forests due to the Talamanca mountains which act as a barrier to the
moist west winds causing them to precipitate on Pacific coast and deluging
the Osa Peninsula with 350-600 centimeters of rain per year.
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