Green travel guide

Reforestation in Costa Rica: Native Trees and the People Behind Them

Costa Rica's best reforestation projects grow native species in local nurseries, plant them with permission, and care for them for years afterward. Groups like Costas Verdes on the Pacific coast, the Monteverde Conservation League and Osa Conservation show that survival, maintenance and willing landowners matter more than the number of trees planted on one day.

By Pura-Verde.com Editors · Published October 30, 2026 · Last checked October 30, 2026

Best for

Travelers who want to plant native trees with an organized, permitted project

Where

Pacific beaches from Nosara to Garabito, the Monteverde region, Coto Brus and the Osa area, Mastatal in Puriscal

When

Most planting happens early in the rainy season, so young trees get months of water before the dry season

Good to know

Costa Rica pays landowners to protect forest through FONAFIFO's Payment for Environmental Services program under Forestry Law 7575

Ask before you go

Where the seeds come from, who waters the trees afterward, and how survival is measured

A surfer wanted shade for the person he loved. A nursery crew in Nosara grows the seedlings. A farmer in Coto Brus came home to find pasture where she remembered forest. Costa Rica's reforestation stories start small, and the good ones don't end when the last tree goes in the ground.

A tree-planting photo is satisfying: smiling volunteers, shovels, a neat row of seedlings. But a badly placed tree can die in its first dry season, a fast-growing exotic species may do little for native wildlife, and a grove nobody maintains won't reconnect anything. Real restoration is a long relationship between people, soil, water, plants and animals. The projects worth your time are the ones willing to talk about survival, setbacks, local jobs and what happens after visitors go home.

Why Costa Rica is a good place to learn about reforestation

Costa Rica cleared much of its forest for cattle and crops in the mid-1900s, then changed course. The 1996 Forestry Law (Law 7575) created FONAFIFO, the national forestry fund, and its Payment for Environmental Services program, which pays owners of forests and plantations for services like water protection, biodiversity and carbon storage. Part of the national fuel tax still goes to that program.

That history means you'll find every kind of restoration here: forest regrowing on its own on old pasture, community nurseries, coastal replanting, fruit trees on working farms and corridor projects linking protected areas. It also means you can see the difference between a project that plants and one that restores.

Costas Verdes: a promise of shade that became a coastal movement

The Costas Verdes story starts with a surfer. As Daniel Cruz recounts in a September 2026 Delfino.cr column, founder Max Tattenbach was an agronomy student from San José who spent weekends at Playa Hermosa, where cattle grazing and aggressive vegetation had stripped away most of the shade. He promised his girlfriend, who kept getting sunburned while she read on the beach, that he'd fill it with shade. The group was formally set up as an association in February 2009, and the first trees went in the ground in 2010.

The idea lasted because people stayed. The Costas Verdes team page lists Tattenbach as founder and vice-president. Executive director Gerardo Bolaños, a biologist from San José, moved to Nosara in 2008, started as a volunteer in 2011 and now leads the reforestation projects. Rolando Molina, a Nosara local, joined in August 2014, when the group first hired field workers for the Guiones reforestation and the Nosara tree nursery. He now leads field work in the North Pacific, with José Daniel Díaz as his second-in-command and Brandon López running the Santa Marta nursery that opened in late 2022.

That work is more than planting days. It's collecting native seed, germinating it, running nurseries, improving soil, watering through the dry months, clearing invasive plants and organizing the neighbors who'll look after a regenerated beach. Costas Verdes celebrated its 100,000th tree on July 19, 2025, with a community planting at Playa Guiones. Its own site counted roughly 113,000 trees, 96 reintroduced native species and 48 beaches and communities when we checked in October 2026.

The honest part is just as useful. The Delfino column notes that the first planting in Nosara largely failed, and the group kept going and adjusted. Its stated goal is 300,000 trees and 100 beaches. Ask any project for that kind of candor.

What success looks like five years later

Counting trees is only a starting point. Better questions:

• How many survived after one, two and five years?
• Are the species native to this specific life zone, not just "native to Costa Rica"?
• Is the planting growing into layers, from ground cover to canopy?
• Is natural regeneration increasing on its own?
• Are birds and mammals using the new cover?
• Does the planting respect beach dynamics, turtle nesting and public access?

A coastal dry forest isn't a palm-tree postcard. It's trees adapted to months of drought, with varied fruit and seed for wildlife. A humid Caribbean lowland farm needs a completely different mix. There's no single "best reforestation tree" for every altitude, soil and season.

Sometimes the right call is not to plant at all. Where native forest is already coming back by itself, protecting that regrowth can be cheaper and better than clearing it to install nursery seedlings. Rancho Mastatal, in Puriscal, is a good example: more than 200 acres of former cattle land there are now secondary forest in a private wildlife refuge, regenerated with support from the environment ministry (MINAE) and FONAFIFO.

Farms as forest corridors: Vivian, Uriel and the Coto Brus project

In the Hamacas community of Coto Brus, in southern Costa Rica, a farmer identified only as Vivian returned to her family's land expecting forest and found cleared pasture. As Rare reported in August 2026, she and her husband decided to let the forest grow back, and she's been planting native fruit trees ever since. Monkeys and birds now come down to eat, which hints that the forest above has too little food.

The farm is still a farm, and it's also part of a larger plan. Rare and Osa Conservation are working with farming communities to build a climate-adaptive wildlife corridor across southern Costa Rica. Osa's tropical forests program manager, Rodrigo De Sousa, is a Venezuelan agronomist with more than 15 years in soil stabilization, erosion control and forest restoration, now focused on Coto Brus. Ana Barajas, an applied social scientist at Rare who manages the partnership, works on why some farmers join and others can't.

The same reporting introduces Uriel, a young rancher from Paraíso Changüina, who says landslides are less of a risk where land has been reforested. One family wants fruit trees for monkeys, another wants a safer hillside, another wants shade and forage for cattle. A project that treats every farmer as a recipient of free saplings misses what actually makes trees survive.

Those landowners deserve privacy, too. We describe these projects without pointing to anyone's house, and their farms aren't open to drop-in visits.

Osa Conservation's team page also shows who does the daily work: a tree nursery manager, restoration coordinators for the lowlands and mangroves, and a restoration field crew of about 30 people. That's what a working corridor looks like on the payroll.

Monteverde: a nursery that's been running since the 1980s

The Monteverde Conservation League was founded in early 1986 by local residents worried about forest loss on the Pacific slope. Its history credits Swedish elementary teacher Eha Kern and her pupils, who raised money to buy the first 6 hectares of what became the Children's Eternal Rainforest, after American biologist Sharon Kinsman spoke at their school in 1987.

The league says it has planted more than 1.6 million trees since 1986. In the 1990s its Forests on Farms work helped landowners plant native trees and windbreaks, restoring connections between forest patches in an area that's now part of the Bellbird Biological Corridor.

Today its nursery at Finca Steller, near La Tigra de San Carlos, produces about 3,000 seedlings a year of roughly 20 native species. They go to schools, community groups and local water systems, get planted in the Children's Eternal Rainforest, or are sold to neighbors at a symbolic price. A nursery is a continuity machine: someone has to collect the right seed, raise the plants, spot pests and know whether a seedling belongs on a windy ridge or a wet riverbank.

Why a corridor can't be planted with one species

From the air, much of rural Costa Rica is a patchwork: protected forest, thin lines of trees along streams, and woodlots separated by pasture. Corridors try to make that patchwork work for wildlife. That can mean fruiting trees for birds, riverside forest to protect water, canopy stepping stones for monkeys, or shade trees on cattle land.

The goal isn't always to fill every open space with trees. Some native ecosystems are naturally more open, and pasture is somebody's living. A plan that cuts off a family's income or water access can fail socially even if the aerial photo looks greener. Getting a nursery, a ranching family and a biologist into the same conversation is how a workable corridor gets designed.

Can visitors plant trees in Costa Rica?

Yes, through established organizations. Good starting points:

• Costas Verdes runs volunteer days and a Plant a Tree Tour on Pacific beaches, from the Nosara area in Guanacaste to Playa Hermosa in Garabito. Its site lists schools, families and tourists among its roughly 15,600 volunteers.
• The Monteverde Conservation League is the place to ask about forest restoration around Monteverde; check its volunteering section for current options.
• Rancho Mastatal teaches permaculture and agroforestry on land that's mostly regenerating forest. See our guide to regenerative and organic farms for more places like it.

Don't show up at a beach with a bag of seedlings. Beaches, riverbanks and protected areas have legal rules, nesting turtles and existing management plans, and a well-meant introduced plant can cause real harm. Find an organizer who chooses species, holds permissions and commits to aftercare. If you want a longer stay, our guide to ethical volunteering explains how to vet a placement.

Questions to ask before you book a "plant a tree" experience:

1. Where do the seeds come from?
2. Who chose the species mix, and why?
3. Does the group have permission to plant here?
4. Who waters, weeds and replaces trees, and for how long?
5. How is survival measured, and can you see results from past years?
6. How much of your contribution pays local staff?

A planting donation can be worthwhile, but it isn't automatically a carbon offset for your flight. Be wary of anyone turning a tree count into kilograms of carbon without a published method.

The dry season is part of the story

Guanacaste's dry season is hard on young trees. A seedling can thrive through the rainy months and die before its roots reach steady moisture. Fire, bare soil, cattle, wind and people cutting informal paths all add losses. Guanacaste saw a sharp rise in forest fires in early 2026, which is a reminder of how fragile new plantings are. On the Caribbean side the problems are different: heavy rain, waterlogging, fast weeds and disease.

That's why organized planting usually happens early in the rainy season, which starts around May in most of the country, and why aftercare matters more than the planting day. Monitoring improves every season: if one species keeps surviving and another keeps failing, that's valuable. If a new strip of forest is steering animals toward a dangerous road, the plan needs to change.

It's also the best argument for paying local nursery staff and field crews. Visitors leave at the end of the day. Rolando Molina's crew in Nosara, the Osa field team and the farmer in Hamacas are still there when the rain stops.

More reforestation news and places to explore

Restoration is happening in cities and wetlands too. Read how Curridabat residents planned a pocket forest with 1,540 native plants, how Sámara neighbors are working to restore the Río Lagarto mangrove, and how Nosara landowners created a voluntary corridor from the mountains to the sea. For the dry-season risk, see our report on Guanacaste's 2026 forest fires.

To see the bigger picture, read our guide to nature reserves and wildlife corridors, or browse reserves on the Pura-Verde map.

Frequently asked questions

Can tourists plant trees in Costa Rica?

Yes. Groups like Costas Verdes run volunteer planting days and tree-planting tours on Pacific beaches. Book through an organization that has permission to plant and a plan to care for the trees afterward.

When is the best time to plant trees in Costa Rica?

Early in the rainy season, which starts around May in most of the country, so seedlings get several months of rain before the dry season. On the Caribbean side, rain patterns differ, so follow the local organizer's calendar.

How much forest has Costa Rica restored?

Costa Rica's forest cover has recovered substantially since the 1980s, helped by natural regrowth on abandoned pasture and by FONAFIFO's Payment for Environmental Services program, created under the 1996 Forestry Law. Individual groups add to that: the Monteverde Conservation League reports more than 1.6 million trees planted since 1986.

What trees are used for reforestation in Costa Rica?

Good projects use native species matched to the local life zone, such as dry-forest trees on the Guanacaste coast or rainforest species on the Caribbean slope. Costas Verdes has reintroduced 96 native species, and the Monteverde nursery grows about 20.

Does planting a tree offset my flight?

Not automatically. A planting donation supports restoration, but a verified carbon offset needs measured growth, a published method and independent checks. Ask the organizer what they actually measure.

Sources

1. Costas Verdes: home page and project counter
2. Costas Verdes: Our team
3. Delfino.cr (Daniel Cruz, opinion column, September 2026): Una promesa en una playa de Costa Rica se convirtió en 111.000 árboles
4. Rare (Kaila Ferrari, August 3, 2026): The future of Costa Rica's wildlife corridors runs through its farms
5. Osa Conservation: Meet the team
6. Monteverde Conservation League: Reforestation
7. Monteverde Conservation League: History
8. Rancho Mastatal: Permaculture
9. FONAFIFO: Pago de Servicios Ambientales

We checked these pages when we last updated this guide. We didn't interview the people named; their roles and words come from the sources above.