Playa Guiones, Province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica

5Wahoo 5:00 PM Mar 1, 2020

Beautiful Beach without a Hotel in site.
Playa Guiones is a 3 mile stretch of wide sand beach, surrounded by jungle. There is a 200 meter nature preserve from high tide back with no development. At some points you walk thru the jungle to get to the beach. It has 2 great surf breaks. Outside is for the experienced surfer and can go from head high to 20+ feet. Inside is the break you typically see on a good east coast day. Perfect for beginners. Maybe that's why there's over a dozen surf schools in this little town. At the north end, there are tide pools. Great for toddlers to play in,

4Sweet-spot_for_travel 5:00 PM Jul 9, 2021

Good food & Ambiance. Gorgeous beach lets hope the town stays true to itself with time.
Guiones beach is one of the most beautiful beaches in CR, right up there 2nd to Playa Grande ( IMO) The town is going through a major real estate boom atm so there is a lot of construction going on but I have to say the villas that are being built are in good taste ( tropical modern) and many trees are being preserved to be able to blend with the landscape. I’d wait a year before visiting though if you don’t want to be awaked by construction noise at 7 am ! The road getting there is HORRIBLE like really bad, 45 min of bumpy pot hole filled dirt road before you even get to the town. And they want to keep it that way it seems. Next are the actual Guiones town roads, they are dirt and the tuc tucs and quad bikes def have no intention of slowing down when passing pedestrians so you get a mouthful full of dirt on what is essentially a very pedestrian street. Made me think of a tropical burning man, you need goggles and boots ! Again they like it that way. What makes this town cool is the obvious draw to surfers and the many restaurants and cafes, the variety of food is refreshing after having visited other parts of CR. I can imagine it must have been a cool understated little town once upon a time, unfortunately it seems to have become a little more polished ( minus the roads) and commercial in the last 4 years. With that seems to come the influx of upper scale West Coast boho chic crowd. Was there over the 4th of July weekend and if it weren’t for the tropical vegetation I could have been in a California Beach town by the looks of majority of patrons. Not very Costa Rican. Nevertheless it was an interesting few days. My favorite part by far being Guiones beach itself. Playa Pelada was awesome too. We also took some time to drive to Ostional and walk the beach and saw many turtle tracks, old nests and egg shells.