In the summer of 2021, I had the opportunity to do a mushroom foraging tour in Costa Rica with local biologist Ignacio Arroyo who runs a shiitake mushroom farm called Finca Boryana just outside of the town of San Gerardo de Dota.
This area about 90 minutes south of San Jose, is one of my favourite areas of Costa Rica because it doesn’t get a lot of mass tourism and it really feels off the beaten path for a country that’s extremely touristy.
To give you an idea of how beautiful the cloud forests are after the rain, I had a chance to fly my drone through the clouds that hang over Parque Nacional Los Quetzales from my ecolodge in San Gerardo De Dota.
Mushrooms From Sea To Sky In Costa Rica
While most people head up to the volcanos or the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, the cloud forests in the mountains south of the Central Valley of Costa Rica are absolutely stunning and incredibly rich in biodiversity.
Parque Nacional Los Quetzales is one of the most beautiful cloud forests on Earth and during the rainy season, this area is a magical land of old-growth forests and endless varieties of mushrooms.
From choice edibles to medicinal mushrooms and magic mushrooms Costa Rica is the ultimate tropical paradise for fungiphiles like me. Other areas of the cloud forests that are excellent for mushrooms are surrounding Monteverde in the north and Buenos Aires in the south.
There is also a lot of mushrooms found along the coast with the southern Pacific Coast and the Caribbean coast being much better than the dry tropical forests in Guanacaste.
The best places for finding mushrooms are in Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula and in the Refugio Nacional Gandoca-Manzanillo near Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast.
The Mushrooms of Costa Rica’s Cloud Forests
There are an estimated 65,000 mushroom species in Costa Rica but only around 2,000 species have been identified.
Here are some of the mushrooms we found on our mushroom foraging adventures in the Costa Rican cloud forests around San Gerardo de Dota:
If you want to learn to identify some of the mushrooms in Costa Rica’s cloud forests, I filmed a video of my mushroom foraging tour with Ignacio Arroyo.
This video covers a whole host of edible species of mushrooms in Costa Rica as well as crucial ecological information about where they grow in the country.
His mission at Mindful Ecotourism is to share mindful awareness, experiential learning and community building practices that can reconnect people with nature.
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