The activity guests are most nervous about beforehand and most pleased about afterwards. You descend a rainforest canyon by rope, down the waterfalls rather than around them.
A guide takes a small group into a steep river canyon and you work your way down it. Some sections you walk, some you scramble, some you swim — and at each waterfall you are clipped to a rope and lowered, or you rappel yourself with a guide controlling the line from above.
A typical trip covers a handful of drops, the smallest around fifteen feet and the largest often close to two hundred. Most operators save the big one for the end, by which point the first one feels trivial. Between drops you are walking in a river with canopy overhead and no view of anything except the canyon, which is a large part of the appeal — you are somewhere you could not otherwise get to.
None. This is the thing worth understanding before you rule it out. The technical work is entirely the guides': they rig the anchors, they clip you in, they belay every descent. What you do is lean back, keep your feet in front of you and walk backwards down a wall while someone holds the rope.
What helps is being reasonably fit — there is climbing, scrambling and a lot of walking on uneven wet rock — and being able to talk yourself over an edge once. People who describe themselves as afraid of heights complete these trips routinely. The first drop is the hard one.
Anyone with a shoulder, knee or back problem that makes scrambling on slick rock a bad idea. Anyone who genuinely cannot swim, since some canyons involve short swims between drops. And anyone unwilling to be out of contact for four hours — phones go in a dry bag on the guide, or stay in the van.
It is also the one activity here where a group usually splits. Half will want to do it and half will not, and that is normal. The half who stay behind can take the hanging bridges or the hot springs the same morning.
Reckon on a half to full day, with three to four hours in the canyon and transport either side. It sits at the top end of La Fortuna excursion pricing alongside rafting, for the same reason: a high guide-to-guest ratio and a lot of equipment. Lunch is usually included.
Trips run in rain — this is a rainforest and they would never operate otherwise — but they are cancelled outright after heavy rain, because a canyon is exactly where you do not want to be when the water rises. If yours is called off, that is the operator behaving correctly.
Ask a group at the end of a week here which day they would repeat, and canyoning wins more often than anything else — more than the volcano, more than the rafting. There are two reasons for that, and neither is the adrenaline.
The first is that you go somewhere genuinely inaccessible. Every other excursion here has a car park and a path. A canyon has neither: the only way through it is the way you are going, and for a few hours nobody in the group has any idea what is around the next corner. That is rarer than it sounds.
The second is that it asks something of you. Standing on the lip of a two-hundred-foot waterfall and stepping backwards off it is a small act of trust, in a stranger and in a rope. People who do it come out different for the rest of the day, and that is the part they talk about at dinner.
Helmet, harness, gloves and wetsuit top where needed are all provided. Most operators photograph the descents and sell the images afterwards, which is the only way you will get a picture — you certainly will not be holding a phone.
Treat it as a whole day and do not schedule anything demanding the next morning. Legs and forearms feel it. It pairs well with a hot springs evening, which is precisely what the springs are for.
For groups staying at The Majestic Lodge we book it and handle the driving, and we will tell you honestly whether a particular operator suits the people in your group. What we arrange →
$1,350 per night for the entire property — 10 en-suite bedrooms, sleeping up to 33, with breakfast included.
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