2023-06-21 20:37:31
Not many ships get lost as far as Golfito, a sweltering town of 15,000 in the Golfo Dulce on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific coast, near the Panamanian border. Most tourists do not stay long in the village, but make the short journey to the nearby Piedras Blancas National Park, a 150 square kilometer stretch of the finest tropical rainforest that was saved from deforestation by Austrians: a paradise of biodiversity with mosses, ferns and monumental trees. There are also sloths, howler monkeys and tropical birds of all kinds. South of Golfito there are some beaches that are popular with surfers.
Rainer Hank
Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
When landing in Golfito, a loading terminal at the port that is oversized for the town, old cranes, dilapidated warehouses and a rusty steam engine that has long been overgrown with weeds in a rotten, open shed that could be taken for a kind of museum are irritating. These are legacies of the “Golfito Banana Railroad”, the “Ferrocarril del Sur” railway system, which was cleared west through the jungle for more than 320 kilometers in the early 1940s.
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