TORTUGUERO, Limón – Every year, 100,000 tourists visit Tortuguero National Park and its surrounding hotels and restaurants on Costa Rica’s northern Caribbean coast. The park – known for its nesting sea turtles, tranquil canals and lush tropical rain forest – is the country’s fourth most-visited protected area.
In a unanimous vote Tuesday, Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly passed a bill naming the manatee as the country's national marine symbol. The sea cow -- as the creature is also known -- will be Costa Rica's first-ever marine symbol and also the first national symbol for the eastern province of Limón.
Only a few manatees remain in Costa Rica's rivers. In an effort to spread awareness and save the endangered aquatic mammal, conservationists and a group of children from Caribbean province of Limón are pushing to make the sea cow the country's national marine mammal.
Though there aren't many left in Costa Rica's rivers, the manatee is about to become a little more famous after a bill declaring it the national marine mammal passed a first round of legislative debate on Monday.
If we hadn’t known about Tortuguero’s crime wave, the village would have seemed perfectly sweet. The alleged risks didn’t stop us, but an aura of danger wafted everywhere. Such is the power of a headline.
Even for a children’s book, “The Manatee’s Big Day” (Zona Tropical Press) is goofy. For the first few pages, Erin Van Rheenen’s animal adventure looks like a story of zoological teamwork: There’s a shark in the jungles of Tortuguero on Costa Rica's northern Caribbean coast, and the animals are all freaked out. Instead of fearing each other, the rival species band together against their common enemy.
