Caño Island

Caño Island Biological Reserve is a protected island 15km off the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica in the Osa Peninsula. Scuba diving is popular around the island for many reasons. Caño Island is second only to Cocos Island in regards to diving locations in Costa Rica and Central America. Cano Biological Reserve is also home to a huge variety of fish, whales and sharks. Particularly the hammerhead shark where once a year, these majestic animals come to perform their unique mating ritual. With fantastic underwater visibility, one can see on any given day, sea turtles, dolphins, stingrays, manta rays, moray eels, barracudas, tuna, snapper and gruper swimming alongside a variety sharks and humpback or pilot whales. Since the island is a reserve scuba diving numbers are regulated, and visitors are not allowed to remove any marine life, dead or alive. Camping areas have been set up on the island with a ranger station on hand and boat tips here can be arranged from as far off as Dominical or Drake Bay.

Caño is an island of considerable geographical and archeological importance. Fifteen kilometers from the Port of San Pedrillo, this 300-hectare piece of land was formerly a cemetery or burial ground dating back to the pre-Columbian era. Perhaps more commonly known as the location of Costa Rica's mystic stone spheres. The stones may have come from the bed of the Térraba River , to where they were transported by natural processes from sources of parent material in the Talamanca mountains. Unfinished spheres were never found. Like the monoliths of the Old World, the Costa Rican quarry was more than 50 miles away from the final resting place of these mysteries.