There's a corner of Costa Rica where the streets are rivers, the cars are boats, and the main event is a fish the size of a person. Barra del Colorado, where the Río Colorado meets the Caribbean near the Nicaraguan border, remains one of the country's least-visited corners — reachable only by small plane or boat, and unknown even to many Costa Ricans.

The village sits inside the Barra del Colorado National Wildlife Refuge, roughly 200,600 acres of rainforest, lagoons and wetlands. Houses stand on stilts along the banks, kids take a boat to school in life jackets, and daily life runs on tides and rainfall.

This water has serious fishing pedigree. In the late 1960s, San José tackle shop owner Carlos Barrantes realised nobody had ever fly-fished the river's enormous tarpon population, and built Casa Mar lodge on Laguna Agua Dulce. Under manager Bill Barnes, a former Florida PE teacher, Casa Mar became the birthplace of modern tarpon fly fishing — the deepwater fly techniques developed there in the 1970s are now used worldwide. Legends like Lefty Kreh, Dan Blanton and Del Brown fished its waters, and Kreh reckoned more tarpon had been caught there than anywhere else on Earth. The boom faded — Nicaragua's civil war next door scared off visitors through the 1980s, Barnes died in 2002, and the jungle eventually swallowed Casa Mar.

Silver King Lodge, which opened on the river in the early 1990s, outlasted its rivals and is now writing a fresh chapter. New owners took over in 2025, with a proprietor who has fished Barra for three decades. The lodge, raised on pilings above flood level and linked by covered walkways, takes just 24 guests at a time. Fishing remains the draw: guides work the river mouth for giant tarpon and the backwaters for snook, tripletail and other species with real record potential — helped by the only IGFA-certified scale in Barra. Rods are provided, and the captains are locals who've grown up on this water.

Non-anglers aren't an afterthought. Rooms run over 41 square metres with air conditioning and Starlink Wi-Fi, meals lean on fresh local seafood and Costa Rican dishes, and there's a pool, sauna and open bar where dinner conversations stretch long into the night. Howler monkeys handle the alarm clock, and birders can log Caribbean lowland species rarely seen on the Pacific side — the free Merlin app helps. Most guests arrive on a 25-minute flight from San José that's included in the packages; the hardier route is overland to the Caribbean coast, then by boat through the canals.

Why go? This is old-school Costa Rica, decades before the surf-and-zip-line era, in a village that still moves at the speed of the river. For anglers it's a shot at a bucket-list fish in its most storied water; for everyone else it's a rare chance to experience a roadless rainforest community where the wildlife outweighs the crowds. Reservations run through the lodge directly.