Things to Do on a La Fortuna Coffee Trip

Name: La Fortuna Coffee Tours
Brand: La Fortuna Coffee Tours
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Hours, prices and access verified by the La Fortuna Coffee Tours team — last checked 2026-08-29

A farm morning takes two hours, which leaves most of a La Fortuna day free. This is what the rest of the town is for, and how a coffee and cacao tour slots around it without either one being rushed.

The short answer is that La Fortuna coffee farm tours are the flexible part of an itinerary here and everything else is the fixed part. Build the day around the volcano, the waterfall or the springs, then drop the farm into whichever half is left.

Arenal Volcano and the national park

Arenal Volcano is the 1,657-metre cone that stands over every farm in the district. Arenal Volcano National Park was created around it in 1991, protecting the mountain and the forest on its flanks. Nobody climbs the cone; it is closed to ascents. The park's trails run across the old lava and up to viewpoints beneath it.

Clear views are a matter of luck. The summit spends much of the year in cloud, and your best odds are early, which is one argument for putting your farm tour in the afternoon.

The 1968 eruption, and the lava you walk on

On 29 July 1968 the mountain erupted violently after centuries of quiet. It buried more than fifteen square kilometres and destroyed the villages of Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luis, killing 87 people. The eruptive period that began that day ran for forty-two years and ended in December 2010.

Arenal is still classified as active and is now in its longest quiet stretch since 1968. The lava field you walk across on the park trails is what those decades left behind, and it is close enough to town to fit into a morning.

La Fortuna Waterfall

A seventy-metre fall dropping into a pool at the base of Cerro Chato, about five and a half kilometres from town inside a private biological reserve. Getting down is roughly five hundred steps and getting back up is the same five hundred. Allow forty-five minutes down and an hour up, with time to swim at the bottom.

Entry in 2026 is $18 for an adult, $5 for children between five and eleven, and free under five. Take your swimsuit and shoes you can manage stairs in, and give yourself longer than the walk time suggests.

The hot springs

Arenal's other legacy is geothermal. Several resorts along the road west of town run thermal pools at different temperatures, set in tropical gardens. The full-day trip from San José finishes at one of them. Book yours late in the day, after you have done something that made you tired — you will get far more out of it.

Sloths, and where to see them

You will find a guided sloth trail six hundred metres east of the central park, and it comes bundled with a farm tasting on two of the tours listed here. Your guide works with a tripod-mounted spotting scope, which is the difference between a rumour of a sloth and a photograph of one.

Sloths also turn up uninvited. They are spotted mid-tour on six of the farms in this district, along with toucans, red-eyed tree frogs, coatis and armadillos. The gallery has the frames the farms publish.

Fitting a farm morning around the rest

The farm tours are the most flexible thing in La Fortuna, because they are short and because one of them publishes four departures a day. That makes them the anchor rather than the obstacle:

Waterfall then farm: steps first while you are fresh, then the one o'clock cacao tour.
Farm then springs: the eight or ten o'clock departure, lunch in town, then thermal pools in the late afternoon.
Wildlife and farm together: one three-hour booking that does both, leaving the whole afternoon free.
A wet day: the covered-trail farm in the morning and the springs after, because neither one minds rain.

If you have two days

Give the volcano and the waterfall one of them and the farms the other. Put the farm day on whichever morning looks wettest, because the covered trails and the roofed ranchos are the most rain-proof thing in town. What rain actually does to a farm tour sets out which is which. The tours themselves are on La Fortuna Coffee Tours.