Week left in the month, you still have time to catch the tail end of Costa Rica’s dry season — warm temperatures around 86°F (30°C), highly active wildlife, and mornings that are reliably sunny and clear. Brief afternoon showers may appear, but they are short, refreshing, and honestly part of what makes this particular window so beautiful. If you can move fast, go. If you can’t, use this guide to plan April next year before anyone else does.
“There’s a specific quality of light in Costa Rica in late April that doesn’t exist anywhere else, at any other time. The forest is deep green and just barely damp. The air smells like warm earth after the first rains. And the animals — the toucans, the macaws, the howler monkeys in the distance — are impossibly loud, as if they know something is ending.”
We’ve been guiding travelers through this country for years, and we still notice it every April. Something shifts. The dry season starts to exhale. The green season is gathering itself just beyond the horizon. And for the last two or three weeks of April, Costa Rica exists in this extraordinary in-between state — warm and wild and quietly, unapologetically perfect.
Most people don’t know about this window. They book December or January because every “best time to visit” article told them to. They miss April entirely. And then someone tells them what they missed and they spend the next year trying to work it into their schedule.
This guide is for two kinds of people: those who still have time to catch the end of April, and those who want to make sure they don’t miss it next year.
What the Weather Actually Feels Like Right Now
Costa Rica’s dry season runs from December through April, and right now — in the final stretch — it still very much holds. Temperatures across the Pacific coast, the Central Valley, and the Caribbean lowlands are sitting around 86°F (30°C) during the day. Mornings are clear almost without exception. The sky that particular shade of blue that makes every photograph look edited when it isn’t.
What changes in late April is the afternoon. Around 3 or 4pm, you might notice the clouds building over the mountains. Sometimes they break into rain — a warm, heavy shower that lasts forty minutes and then vanishes completely, leaving everything cleaner and greener and smelling extraordinary. Other days the clouds just drift past and the evening is clear all the way to sunset. Either way, it is not a reason to stay home.
30°C
per day
green season