Poás erupted Thursday morning and threw rock 600 meters (about 1,970 feet). The park is still open — but half as many people get in each day, and you now wear a helmet to the crater. That's the week's most useful piece of news if you have a trip planned.

Also this week: a ray the color of a gold coin that exists nowhere else in the scientific record, a warning from the US Embassy that turned out to be smaller than it sounded, and the reason Canadians are about to reshape the high season.

1,064 — visitors now allowed at Poás per day, down from 2,052

25.1% — growth in Canadian arrivals, January through July, the fastest of any market

₡452.02 — Central Bank reference rate to sell, roughly 12% below the 2024 average (as reported August 24)

29 — years without a preventable drowning in Dominical's patrolled zone

7 — species of sharks and rays, out of about 1,250 worldwide, ever documented with golden coloring

The crater viewpoint now holds 56 people at a time, for 20 minutes. / The Tico Times

If Poás is on your list, you can still go. But book earlier than you were planning to. The park cut its daily limit to 1,064 visitors, down from 2,052, so roughly half as many people get in. Tickets come through the SINAC reservation system and they are going to get scarce on weekends and holidays.

You will need a helmet on the main crater trail and on Sombrilla de Pobre. Both trails stay open. At the viewpoint itself, only 56 people are allowed at once and you get 20 minutes. Hours are unchanged — 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., last entry at 2 p.m.

The reason for all of it is what happened at 2:36 a.m. on Thursday. The volcano threw hot rock and volcanic material about 600 meters (roughly 1,970 feet) from the crater.

Nothing was damaged and no ash fell outside the park. The rules exist because pressure can build again, and fewer people at the rim means fewer people exposed if it does. There is no end date. Conditions can change fast, so check before you drive up.

→ What to know before you book

Nonimmigrant appointments in San José are going ahead. / The Tico Times

Keep your appointment. If it's for a tourist or business visa, nothing has changed and you should not reschedule on your own. The international coverage this week sounded much worse than what is actually happening in San José.

One group is affected and it's small. Immigrant visa interviews — the kind leading to US permanent residence — were rescheduled for the final days of August only. If that's you, check your email, including the promotions folder, because notices are going out that way.

The cause is a State Department training program for consular officers on the public charge rule, which officers are expected to apply more strictly going forward. New applications can still be filed. The pause is on interviews, not paperwork.

Read the full story →

Canadian traffic runs through Liberia, not San José. / The Tico Times

Canadian arrivals rose 25.1% from January through July, according to ICT figures. Nothing else came close — the Netherlands was second at 16.5%, Spain third at 13.9%, and North America overall grew 7%.

The part that affects you is where they land. Canadians skew heavily toward Guanacaste and arrive through Liberia rather than Juan Santamaría, concentrating tens of thousands of extra visitors on a narrow set of beach towns and roads.

Expect it to show up first in the things that run out — beach parking, a seven o'clock table, last-minute rooms over Canadian school holidays, which don't line up with American ones.

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Record arrivals, thinner accounts. / The Tico Times

Three tourism chambers are warning that the colón's strength is swallowing the gains that record arrivals should be producing. Businesses earn in dollars and pay in colones, so when the dollar buys less, the same volume of business covers less of the payroll.

Growth in lodging and food service slowed to 2.6% year-on-year in June, the weakest reading in five months. Economist Alberto Franco said appreciation entirely neutralized the effect of higher arrivals in the first quarter.

Not everyone agrees the picture is settled — former Central Bank general manager Félix Delgado urged caution before quantifying the real effect, since it depends on when firms actually converted their dollars.

Read the full story →

Text, maps and WhatsApp first. Calls come later. / The Tico Times

Liberty and Kolbi both signed with Starlink on the same day in April. When your phone loses its terrestrial signal, it connects to a low-orbit satellite instead — no antenna, no separate device, just a clear view of the sky and updated software.

Neither service is live. Both target the second half of 2026. The first phase covers text messages, Google Maps lookups and some WhatsApp functions. Calls and video will likely be unavailable at launch. Liberty is aiming at hikers, campers and anglers; Kolbi is starting with corporate and government clients. The technology already proved itself when Hurricane Melissa took down Jamaica's cell towers.

Read the full story →

Image: Aguancaste

It should have been sandy brown with dark spots. Instead a juvenile blotched round ray, caught in shallow water off Playa Manzanillo in La Cruz, came out a deep saturated yellow. The condition is called xanthism. Of roughly 1,250 known shark and ray species worldwide, it has been documented in seven. Within the order containing stingrays there was exactly one prior case, in the Atlantic. None had ever been recorded in the Eastern Tropical Pacific.

The animal was caught twice, in February and again two months later, by a monitoring program the conservation group Equipo Tora Carey has run on that beach since 2018. No tag was used. Researchers matched the pattern of dark spots between the two sets of photographs, the way whales are identified by tail markings. At first capture it weighed 25 grams, about the weight of a AA battery.

That second sighting is the scientifically interesting part. Bright coloring is usually a liability for a small fish — easier for predators to see, worse odds of finding a mate. Finding the same ray alive, feeding and measurably larger suggests the color wasn't costing it much.

What caused it is unresolved. Genetic mutation, diet, hormones and gestation problems are all candidates. So is pollution, which the authors spend the most time on. Heavy metals and pesticides in seafloor sediment have been linked to developmental disorders in fish elsewhere, and bottom-dwelling species rest in that sediment and eat what lives in it.

The team notes that this stretch of coast has produced an unusually high number of deformed rays in recent years, and calls for environmental testing rather than drawing the connection itself.

→ Read the full story

The Guardavidas Costa Ballena station at Dominical. / Don Mateo

In the first half of the 1990s, Dominical averaged twenty drownings a year. Untrained rescuers going in after swimmers sometimes turned one death into two. Then in December 1996, a group of California expats brought in a veteran lifeguard from the States, trained eight local residents, and built a tower.

Preventable drownings in the patrolled area since then: zero. Twenty-nine years of it. For the first twenty of those years the program received nothing from any level of government, surviving on private donations and an annual Fourth of July fundraiser at the Roca Verde Hotel.

Costa Rica sees between 150 and 200 drownings a year, many on beaches with conditions like Dominical's. Don Mateo's argument is that the community didn't wait for the bureaucracy, and that's the whole lesson.

→ Read the full story

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