The Recreo Verde tourist complex in Venecia de San Carlos, Costa Rica, is home to a tiny mountain cavern that has come to be known as The Cave of Death due to its ability to kill any creature that enters it.

Located on the edge of the Poas Volcano, la Cueva de la Muerte is only 2 meters deep and 3 meters long, which makes it a seemingly cozy refuge for insects, birds, and small animals looking for shelter. But appearances can be deceiving, as entering this tiny cavern results in an almost instant death. Although the tiny cave looks harmless to the naked eye, it is filled with carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that also happens to be extremely toxic. To demonstrate just how lethal the Cave of Death actually is, local guides place a lit torch inside the cavern and it is extinguished instantly by the absence of oxygen and the high concentration of carbon dioxide.

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Mobile phones being smuggled into prisons is a worldwide problem, but Costa Rica may have recently became the first country where people are using “trained cats” to deliver cell phones into prisons.

On Tuesday morning, the Costa Rican Ministry of Justice released a video of a cat intercepted while trying to make its way into La Reforma prison, in Alajuela. Footage shows the feline with a strange parcel strapped to its chest and tied around its neck. After struggling to remove the package from the animal, penitentiary staff cut it open and reveal that it contains a used mobile phone, as well as a charger, a replacement battery and earbuds.

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20 years ago, a couple of ecologists fighting for the conservation of Costa Rica’s tropical ecosystems convinced a large orange juice producer to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dispose of massive amounts of orange peels on a degraded plot of land within that same park. No one had any idea what an impact that would have.

In 1997, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, a husband and wife team of ecologists working with the Área de Conservación Guanacaste national park, in Costa Rica, came up with a plan to save a piece of unspoiled, completely forested land from a big fruit juice company, by offering something very attractive in return. If the company, Del Oro, agreed to donate part of its forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, they would be allowed to deposit massive amounts of waste in the form of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of degraded land within the national park, at no cost. Disposing of tons of leftover pulp and peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

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Up until four years ago, Rio Celeste, a 14-kilometer river in Costa Rica’s Alajuela province, was a complete mystery to scientists, who could not understand why its waters had an unusual turquoise color. And then they realized that it wasn’t turquoise at all.

Theories regarding the turquoise color of Rio Celeste had been circulating in the scientific community for years, but nobody had ever managed to provide enough evidence to solve this natural enigma. Some claimed that the unusual coloring was caused by high levels of copper, but tests revealed that there was no copper in the water, others said that it was due to chemicals like calcium carbonate and sulfur, and some even connected it to the river’s proximity to the Tenorio Volcano. Everyone was so convinced that a mysterious chemical reaction was turning the water turquoise that they never even entertained the possibility of an optical illusion.

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‘Territorio de Zaguates’ (Land of the Mixed Breeds) is probably as close as it gets to a real-life doggy heaven. Located in a beautiful part of Costa Rica where the sun shines all year round and the average temperature is a pleasant 22 degrees C, this unique canine haven is home to 900-odd stray dogs with bizarre breed names like ‘Chubby-Tailed German Dobernauzer’ and ‘Fire-Tailed Border Cocker’.

The privately funded, volunteer-run organisation takes in strays from across the country, and and gives dog lovers a chance to spend time with them and hopefully give one of them a forever home. The dogs get to run around all day in a green, grassy, well-maintained outdoor space, but they also have access to a modern indoor facility with cozy bedding and designated feeding and bathing stations. To keep the dogs hydrated, troughs of fresh flowing water are installed at various points on the property.  

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Calling Albert Podell ‘well traveled’ would be an understatement. 78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!

Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by that.”

“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”

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While the bullfights of Spain and Mexico generally don’t end well for the bull, Costa Ricans prefer to do things differently. Since cattle are revered as a source of income for thousands of farming families in the nation, they don’t consider it practical to kill bulls for sport. Although bullfights are a main event at Zapote – the annual Costa Rican bull festival – the bulls always leave the arena unscathed.

Corridas de toros (bullfights) are held all through the year in Costa Rica, but Zapote’s is considered to be the country’s grandest event. At the end of each year, cattle farmers from all over the nation haul their bulls and gather at the capital, for the much-awaited celebration. And instead of glorifying man’s power over the beast, the bullfights during Zapote celebrate bulls. The animals are never to be killed, only dodged.

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Spread all over Diquis Delta, and on the Isla de Cano, the mysterious stone spheres of Costa Rica have fascinated scientists ever since they were discovered, in 1930.

Known as “Las Bolas”, by the locals, the spheres range from a few inches to meters, in diameter, and reach weights of up to 16 tons. Researchers believe they were sculpted before 200 BC and 1500 AD, but since the only way of establishing their age is stratography, and most of the balls are no longer in their original locations, it’s difficult to say for sure.

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