Niche Fever Articles

Cocos Island is a national park of Costa Rica nearly halfway to the Galapagos Islands. Jacques Cousteau called it the most beautiful island in the world, Costa Ricans voted it one of its Seven Wonders, and it is a finalist as one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Though it is a small island located nearly 350 miles off the Costa Rica Pacific coast, it is world famous for its spectacular scuba diving. Indeed, its waters are filled with fish, porpoises, whales, and sea turtles, and there are sometimes so many sharks, it is often called Shark Island. Experienced scuba divers travel here from across the planet because it is renowned as the greatest place on earth to dive with large sea animals.

For centuries, the island has been famous for pirates, real and imagined. Some people believe that it served as inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson’s famous pirate novel Treasure Island but real pirates often sailed to it to get away from the English fleet and to bury treasure there. Indeed two great treasures, the Devonshire Treasure and the incomparable Lima Treasure, were buried there and, to this day, may still be there. Buried treasure, hundreds of millions of dollars in gold and jewels, waiting for discovery.

Cocos Island also fired the imagination of author Michael Crichton who set his world famous novel—and Steven Spielberg’s movie—Jurassic Park there.

With the exception of a few Costa Rica park rangers whose job it is to protect its waters from poaching, the island is uninhabited. Its isolation has protected its rainforest from depredation and for centuries its underwater splendor was unmolested .

Only a few fortunate people get to visit Cocos and if you want to go ashore, you will need previous permission from the rangers. Overnight camping is forbidden. But, no matter. As you walk the shores, looking out over the great Pacific, your imagination can soar. You’ll be walking the very shores that famous pirates hid buried treasure and you will not be alone. It is almost as if some of the stones themselves can talk for you are going to find rocks and boulders bearing the inscriptions of past sailors who left their moment of history behind, writing their names, the names of their ships and ports of call, even the dates. Sailors, long gone but not forgotten by the rocks. Like Kilroy, they were here.