In November 2025, Christine and I returned to Costa Rica, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Amidst all that diversity, one of the highlights of any visit is the amazing colourful frogs. While it’s possible to find frogs in most hotel or lodge gardens, you’re better off on a guided tour. The benefits of hiring a guide cannot be overstated:
- Safety – Yours and the animal’s. It hardly needs saying, but poison dart frogs are very poisonous. They also live in habitats occupied by highly toxic snakes.
- You’ll see and learn so much more – Again, it’s stating the obvious but guides know where to look. You’ll see far more than you could imagine and you’ll get a deeper understanding.
- Better images – Herpetology guides are skilled at handling frogs, which you must never do. They can place the frog in a safe, accessible pose for photography and safely return them to where they were found.
- Conservation – Hiring a guide allows them and their family to earn a living from nature, ensuring that local people have a vested interest in protecting the environment and, in some cases, reward the rewilding of land.
For this trip, we booked three night tours focused on frogs at Sierpe and Drake Bay on the Osa Peninsula, and Frogs Heaven in Sarapiqui. We had a fourth night tour at Tapir Valley, although it wasn’t specifically aimed at frogs, but there are plenty of herpetology opportunties.
Each location was an amazing experience, delivering fabulous regional and site-specific endemics. The Tapir Valley Tree Frog is probably the rarest animal I’ll ever see, only found in an 8-hectare wetland in the Tapir Valley reserve. I was thrilled to photograph this beautiful frog despite being in the middle of a neotopical rainstorm.
However, Frogs Heaven was the highlight for me. This relatively small, family run reserve is a rewilded estancia, only 25 minutes’ drive from the very popular Selva Verde Lodge in Sarapiqui province. We visited during an unusually dry period, so the frogs and snakes were not as active, but we still saw plenty of frogs and, most importantly, captured my favourite images from the entire trip. I’d return again in a heartbeat.
Just to prove my point that it’s possible to see frogs in the grounds of your hotel, I found the rare Golden-eyed Tree Frog in the gardens of the Bougainvillea Hotel, San Jose, while the New Granada Cross-banded Tree Frog was in a pond at our lodge, Posada Río Celeste La Amistad, near Tapir Valley.