Montezuma Waterfall is a set of three falls stacked one above another in the jungle behind the beach village of Montezuma, at the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula in Puntarenas province, Costa Rica, each with its own swimming pool, the lowest falling 24 metres into a pool deep enough to swim in. The path leaves the village by the river, over roots and boulders through humid forest loud with insects and birds, and reaches the main fall in about twenty minutes, where the water drops in a white column into a wide green pool between rock walls and people swim under the spray; a steeper trail climbs beside it to the second and third falls above, where the jumping happens, from ledges over the upper pool that step from a couple of metres up to about ten, with a rope swing over the water. Moving slowly, the forest fills in: a collared aracari clattering in the canopy, squirrels along the branches, and the white-throated magpie-jay, a noisy blue-and-white bird with a curling crest, calling through the trees in the cool of the morning, whose family life is unusual, with the young staying home for years to help raise their siblings.
The village is a few minutes from the falls, a small place of surfers and yoga on a rocky Pacific shore, and the coast runs away from it in long, near-deserted beaches with tide pools scattered among the rocks, reached on foot along the sand. A few kilometres south lies Cabo Blanco, set aside in 1963 as the first protected reserve in Costa Rica, the spark for a park system now admired around the world, with a trail through forest to a white-sand cove. The forest around Montezuma is inside the Nicoya Peninsula, one of only five places on Earth mapped as a Blue Zone, where people reach very old age at unusual rates. Montezuma Waterfall is a swimming hole with a village at its foot, and the whole peninsula is its garden.