The stretch that matters to tourists, a municipal representative explains, runs from Quepos to Manuel Antonio — barely ten kilometres end to end, but it carries the whole region's tourism economy on its back.
Quepos itself used to be a quiet fishing village. Today it's a lively town of roughly 11,000 people, and nearly every tourist headed to the park passes through it and stays a while. The restaurants and cafés fill up every single evening.
Manuel Antonio, for its part, is a small national park by Costa Rican standards — but also one of the most visited in the entire country. Its easy access by bus from San José means almost every tourist who comes ends up spending a few days there.
As a municipality, he says, they're genuinely happy with what tourism has done for the area. When the Standard Fruit Company pulled its fruit plantations out of the region, it hit the local economy hard; tourism has gone a long way toward filling that gap. Drive through the region today and you can still spot the company-built houses that mark that earlier era.
Not everyone shares his confidence. The park's own management is increasingly worried that Manuel Antonio's carrying capacity — the maximum number of visitors the park can absorb without nature suffering for it — may eventually be exceeded, and they're actively looking at ways to spread out or reduce visitor numbers.
“The area needs development, and it's only logical that something has to be sacrificed for that.”
The municipality, though, isn't losing sleep over it. The area needs development, he says, and a certain amount of sacrifice is simply the price of that — a calculation the park's own conservationists would frame rather differently.