Area de Conservación Guanacaste World Heritage Site
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How it came to be
The Area de Conservación Guanacaste is a network of protected areas in north-western Costa Rica, and one of its cores, Santa Rosa National Park, was originally created to protect the scene of the Battle of Santa Rosa. On 20 March 1856 Costa Rican forces attacked the filibusters of William Walker, who were quartered in the main farm building, La Casona; the battle lasted 14 minutes.
In 1985 the American ecologist Daniel Janzen and his wife Winnie Hallwachs, seeing the dry forest where they worked being cleared, began buying land and restoring the forest. They proposed Guanacaste National Park in 1986, and in 1989 the park and the conservation area were established. The area joined Santa Rosa, Rincón de la Vieja Volcano National Park, Junquillal Bay Wildlife Refuge and Guanacaste National Park, and local people trained as 'parataxonomists' took on the survey of its species.
According to UNESCO, the area holds the best dry forest habitats from Central America to northern Mexico. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1999 and extended in 2004 with Santa Elena, a private property of 15,000 ha.
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