Cocos Island is one of the treasures of the planet. The renowned Jacques Cousteau called this Costa Rica island the most beautiful island he had ever seen , Costa Ricans have voted this little national park one of its Seven Wonders, and it is being considered as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

The island is some 340 miles off the Pacific shore of Costa Rica. Though it is a very small island, only about nine square miles, its fame today comes from its underwater treasure. It is one of the truly great places in the world for scuba diving, considered by some to be the best place on the planet for large marine animal viewing. The island sometimes has so many sharks around it that it has been called Shark Island. There are an incredible number of species of tuna, rays, sharks, and other fish, as well as sea turtles, porpoises, and whales. Hammerhead sharks are common and some of the largest Hammerheads ever reported were seen off this island.

The island has long been famous for pirates, real and imagined. Some people think that it served as inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson’s famous adventure Treasure Island but real pirates often sailed to it to get away from the English fleet and to bury treasure. Indeed to this day two great treasures, called the Devonshire Treasure and the Lima Treasure, may still be buried there. How big are they? Think hundreds of millions of dollars.

It also fired the imagination of Michael Crichton whose famed Jurassic Park is set off the coast of Costa Rica.

The island is very isolated, hundreds of miles from any other land. Except for a few Costa Rica park rangers who are there to prevent its waters from poaching, it is uninhabited. That isolation has protected its rainforest from destruction and for centuries its underwater splendor was also unmolested .

If you are one of the fortunate few who get to visit Cocos, you will need previous permission from the rangers to go ashore and you will not be allowed to camp overnight. But, as you walk the shores, thinking of pirates and imagining where the buried treasure is, you will see many rocks along the shore bearing inscriptions from sailors over the centuries. Way before Kilroy was here, sailors wrote their names and dates of visits. There is even find one bearing the name of Jacque Cousteau’s son, who signed a rock a couple of decades ago.

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