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Costa Rica Eco Travel
By Lisa Khajavi
The evolution of 'Ecotourism'
As a world-wide leader in nature-oriented travel, with 5% of the world's biodiversity within only .035%
of the world's land, Costa Rica continues to be in the spotlight for ecotourism. Since 1993, tourism has
been the top generator of foreign revenues for Costa Rica, surpassing both bananas and coffee. The
ICT (Costa Rican Institute for Tourism) acknowledges that the tourism in Costa Rica has become
mainly ecotourism. It is easy to see why, with Costa Rica's 26 national parks, 58 wildlife refuges, 32
protected zones, 15 wetland areas or mangroves, 11 forest reserves, 8 biological reserves, as well as
12 other conservation regions. The array of flora and fauna is staggering. Martha Honey of the CESD
(Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development) cites the following:
"This West Virginia-sized country boasts more bird species (850) than are found in the United States
and Canada combined, more variety of butterflies than in all of Africa, more than 6,000 kinds of
flowering plants (including 1,500 varieties of orchids), and over 35,000 species of insects. Costa Rica
is, as former minister of natural resources Alvaro Umana put it, a biological superpower." (Honey 2003)
All of this natural wonder in the most stable country both socially and politically in Central America,
perhaps even all of Latin America, is heaven for especially the ecotraveler. To its credit, Costa Rica
has the highest percentage of protected land in the world (Fenell and Eagles 1990). Further, Costa
Rica has preserved these lands and natural habitats in