Manuel Antonio National Park is open 24 of the 28 days of February 2027. It closes every Tuesday — February 2, 9, 16 and 23 — and on the other 24 days it runs 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., with last entry at 2:00 p.m. February is the second-driest month of the Manuel Antonio year: 150.8 mm of rain across 7.7 rainy days, against January’s 222.7 mm. This page has the numbers, the ticket window, the four tour prices and the dates to avoid, so you can lock a February date without guessing.
Book February 2027 now: WhatsApp Wakoo Tours at +506 8514 1361 or check live dates and availability. Four options, no high-season surcharge: Classic Group $30, Premium $65 all-in, Classic Private $69, V.I.P. Private $100 per person.
Yes, on 24 of the 28 days. The park is closed every Tuesday, which in February 2027 means February 2, February 9, February 16 and February 23. Every other day it opens 7:00 a.m. and stops admitting visitors at 2:00 p.m., closing the gate at 3:00 p.m. February 1, 2027 is a Monday, so the month opens on a normal operating day, and February 28 is a Sunday, also open. Source: SINAC, the Costa Rican park authority.
There is no Costa Rican public holiday inside February 2027 that changes the park schedule. That makes February the cleanest month of the high season to plan around: one closed weekday a week, nothing else.
February is drier than January and warmer: 150.8 mm of rain across 7.7 rainy days, 8.7 hours of sun a day, a daytime high of 28.1 °C / 82.6 °F and a night low of 23.4 °C. That is 32% less rain than January’s 222.7 mm and 70% less than December’s 503.1 mm. Source: weather-and-climate.com, Quepos station, Foreca and Copernicus C3S averages 1991 to 2020.
| Month | Rainfall | Rainy days | Sunshine / day | Avg high |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 2026 | 503.1 mm | 14.1 | 8.3 h | 27.8 °C |
| January 2027 | 222.7 mm | 10.5 | 9.0 h | 27.6 °C / 81.7 °F |
| February 2027 | 150.8 mm | 7.7 | 8.7 h | 28.1 °C / 82.6 °F |
| March 2027 | 134.8 mm | 7.0 | 9.0 h | 28.4 °C / 83.1 °F |
What 7.7 rainy days actually means on the ground: roughly three quarters of February mornings are dry. When rain does arrive in the dry season it arrives late afternoon, after a 7:00 a.m. tour is already finished. The trails also drain faster than in December, so the mud that slows a December walk is mostly gone by February.
On the weather numbers, yes. February has 150.8 mm of rain against January’s 222.7 mm, 7.7 rainy days against 10.5, and a daytime high half a degree warmer. January’s advantage is 9.0 hours of sun a day against February’s 8.7, and one more open day in the month. January’s disadvantage is crowds: it carries the tail of the Christmas and New Year window, and the park fills earlier in the morning.
If you are choosing between the two purely on trail conditions and how quiet the first hour is, February wins. If you are choosing on light for photography, the two are within a rounding error. Our January 2027 page has the same numbers for that month.
Exactly two months before your visit date. For February 1, 2027 the window opened December 1, 2026; for February 28, 2027 it opens December 28, 2026. The window is per date, not per month, so a February 20 ticket cannot be bought before December 20.
Tickets are sold only by SINAC at serviciosenlinea.sinac.go.cr. They are never sold at the gate. Every February the same thing happens: visitors arrive at the entrance on an open day, with no ticket, and are turned away. The park entrance is $18.08 for adults and $5.65 for children 2 to 12, and it has to be bought online in advance.
If that two-month window is inconvenient — and for a February trip booked in September it is — the Premium $65 option exists exactly for this: the ticket is bought for you on the day the window opens, and transport is included. You do not have to set a calendar reminder for December.
Park entrance is $18.08 per adult and $5.65 per child aged 2 to 12, paid to SINAC. On top of that, Wakoo Tours publishes four guided options with no high-season surcharge in February, all per person:
| Option | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Classic Group | $30 | ICT-certified guide, Swarovski spotting scope, photos and video. Park ticket not included. |
| Premium | $65 | All-in: park ticket and hotel transport included. Shared group. |
| Classic Private | $69 | Private guide, only your group on the walk. |
| V.I.P. Private | $100 | Flexible departure time, private guide, a scope that is never shared. |
A couple doing the Classic Group in February pays $60 for the tour plus $36.16 in entrance fees: $96.16 total. The same couple on Premium pays $130 with nothing left to buy. Full breakdown in our Manuel Antonio tour cost guide.
The same resident cast as every month: three-toed and two-toed sloths, white-faced capuchins, howler monkeys, Central American squirrel monkeys, agoutis, iguanas and more than a hundred bird species. What February changes is visibility, not the animals. With 7.7 rainy days and drier canopy, sloths sit more exposed and the squirrel monkey troops move along the main trail earlier in the morning.
February also sits inside the tail of the humpback whale season in the Pacific — the northern-hemisphere population is in Costa Rican water roughly December through March. That is visible from the park’s beaches and from a boat, not from the forest trail. No sighting can be promised, in February or any other month. What a guide with a Swarovski scope changes is the odds and the quality of the look, not the certainty.
As close to the 7:00 a.m. opening as possible. The animals are most active in the first two hours, and the temperature at 7:00 a.m. in February is around 23 °C against a 28.1 °C midday high — the difference between a comfortable walk and a hot one. Last entry is 2:00 p.m., which technically leaves an hour, but a 2:00 p.m. entry in February gets the quietest wildlife hour of the day and the strongest heat.
Our February tours leave at 7:00 a.m. The V.I.P. Private $100 option is the one that lets you pick a different departure time if 7:00 a.m. does not work with a flight or a hotel checkout.
You are not legally required to have one. What you get for the $30 is a trained eye and a scope. A sloth 25 metres up in a February canopy is a brown shape that most visitors walk straight past; a guide finds it and puts it in a Swarovski scope at 25x so you actually see the face. Our guides are ICT-certified, which is the Costa Rican tourism board credential, and Wakoo Tours holds 4.9 out of 5 across 259 TripAdvisor reviews.
The honest version: if your goal is a walk in a beautiful forest, you can do February unguided. If your goal is to see the animals you came for, the guide is the difference.
February is high season and the park caps daily entries, so the constraint is not our availability but SINAC’s. Because the ticket window opens exactly two months out, the practical answer is: book the tour now, and the ticket gets bought the day its window opens. Booking the tour in September or October for a February date costs nothing extra and locks the guide.
The dates that fill first in February 2027 are the weekends: February 6-7, 13-14, 20-21 and 27-28. If your trip has flexibility, a Wednesday or Thursday in February is both easier to get and quieter on the trail.
Move it a day, or spend that Tuesday on something else. The four closed Tuesdays are February 2, February 9, February 16 and February 23. On those days the park gate does not open at all, for anyone, with or without a ticket.
A closed Tuesday is not a lost day in Manuel Antonio. The mangrove boat tour, the catamaran, the waterfall and the zip line all run on Tuesdays, and the beaches outside the park boundary — Playa Biesanz and Playita — are open. Message us with your Tuesday and we will tell you what actually runs that day.
March, by a small margin: 134.8 mm against February’s 150.8 mm, and 7.0 rainy days against 7.7. March also gets 9.0 hours of sun a day against February’s 8.7. So on paper March is the driest month of the Manuel Antonio year.
The catch is Easter. Easter Sunday 2027 falls on March 28, which puts Semana Santa on March 21-28 — the busiest week of the Costa Rican domestic travel year — and the closed Tuesday of March 23 lands inside it. February has no equivalent week. If you want the driest trails, take March; if you want the emptiest trails, take February. Our March 2027 page has the March dates in full.
Message us on WhatsApp with your February date and how many people: +506 8514 1361. Tell us which of the four options you want — Classic Group $30, Premium $65 all-in, Classic Private $69 or V.I.P. Private $100 — and if you are not sure, say so and we will tell you which one fits. You can also see live dates and availability here.
If your date is one of the four closed Tuesdays, we will say so before you pay, not after.