Cerro de la Muerte Páramo

Frost crunches underfoot at dawn. Wind flattens the tussock grass in waves, and your breath hangs visible — in a country eight degrees north of the equator. On Cerro de la Muerte's high páramo, Costa Rica stops feeling tropical entirely.

The Mountain of Death earned its name before the road came, when crossing the exposed heights on foot killed travellers with cold; now the Interamerican Highway runs over the massif, and the páramo — wind-sculpted dwarf shrubs, tussock and high bogs of a kind you must otherwise seek in the Andes — begins at the roadside. The massif falls inside the Tapantí–Macizo de la Muerte park's protection, and its slopes drop into quetzal cloud forest, where highland lodges run dawn birding walks when the aguacatillo trees fruit. Dry-season nights dip toward freezing; days swing bright and wild. It is Costa Rica's strangest drive — jungle to alpine and back inside an hour.