Cocos Island: One of Costa Rica’s Seven Wonders
July 26, 2009 by Victor C. Krumm
Filed under Destinations
Cocos Island is one of the treasures of the planet. The famous Jacques Cousteau called this Costa Rica island the most beautiful island he had ever seen , Costa Ricans have voted this little national park one of its Seven Wonders, and it is being considered as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.
Though it is a small island located nearly 350 miles off the Costa Rica Pacific coast, it is world famous for its incredible scuba diving. Indeed, its waters are filled with fish, porpoises, whales, and sea turtles, and there are sometimes so many sharks, it is often called Shark Island. Experienced scuba divers travel here from across the planet because it is renowned as the greatest place in the world to dive with large sea animals.
The island has been famous for pirates, real and imagined, for centuries. It is believed by many that Cocos was the inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson’s famous pirate adventure Treasure Island but sometimes real pirates sailed to it to escape the English fleet and to bury their treasure. Two great treasures, the Devonshire Treasure and the Lima Treasure, worth hundreds of millions of dollars today, may still be buried there.
It also fired the imagination of Michael Crichton whose world famous Jurassic Park is set off the coast of Costa Rica.
The island is uninhabited except for a few Costa Rica park rangers who are stationed there to protect its waters from poaching. For eons its isolation safeguarded the island’s rainforest and undersea creatures from depredation .
If you are one of the lucky few who get to visit Cocos, you will need previous permission from the rangers to go ashore and you will not be allowed to camp overnight. But, as you walk the shores, thinking of pirates and imagining where the buried treasure is, you will see many rocks along the shore bearing inscriptions from sailors over the centuries. Way before Kilroy was here, sailors wrote their names and dates of visits. There is even find one bearing the name of Jacque Cousteau’s son, who signed a rock a couple of decades ago.