Manuel Antonio National Park in December is open 26 of the 31 days of December 2026, closed on five Tuesdays, and it is the month the dry season starts to win: 503.1 mm of rain and 8.3 hours of sun a day, against 935.0 mm in November. If you are choosing a date, this page has the calendar, the SINAC ticket window, the four prices we publish and what you can reasonably expect to see.
Send us your date on WhatsApp at +506 8514 1361, or book a December 2026 tour here.
Yes, on 26 of the 31 days. The park is closed every Tuesday, which in December 2026 means December 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29. Every other day it opens from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., with last entry at 2:00 p.m. December 25 falls on a Friday in 2026, so Christmas Day is a normal operating day — the closure rule is the Tuesday rule, nothing else. Source: SINAC, the Costa Rican park service that runs the park. The running version of this calendar lives on our open-today page.
December averages 503.1 mm of rain across 14.1 rainy days, with 8.3 hours of sun a day, a daytime high of 27.4 °C / 81.3 °F and a night low of 22.8 °C. That is roughly half of November’s 935.0 mm, and it is the reason December is the month people fly in for. It is still not a dry month in the European sense: fourteen days out of thirty-one will see rain, usually as an afternoon burst rather than an all-day grey. Source: weather-and-climate.com, the same dataset behind our month-by-month weather table.
Exactly two months before your visit date — not a day earlier, and never at the gate. For December 1, 2026 the window opens on October 1, 2026; for December 31, it opens on October 31. Tickets are sold only by SINAC at serviciosenlinea.sinac.go.cr. This rolling window is what catches people out: you cannot buy the whole trip in one sitting in August. What you can lock in today is the guide, who is the scarcer resource in high season.
Park entrance is $18.08 for adults and $5.65 for children 2–12, paid to SINAC. On top of that we publish four tour options:
The $69 Classic Private sitting above the $65 Premium is deliberate: one sells exclusivity, the other sells convenience. There is no high-season surcharge — the price is the same as in any other month. Full detail on the December booking page.
The animals that make Manuel Antonio famous live there year-round — 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 December changes is not the cast, it is the visibility: 8.3 hours of sun against November’s 5.8 means longer stretches of usable light and drier trails, and a scope pointed at a sloth in sunlight shows you something a scope in rain does not. We will never promise you a specific animal. What we will say is that a guide with a Swarovski scope who walks these trails daily finds things an unguided visitor walks straight past.
As close to the 7:00 a.m. opening as you can manage. Two reasons, both December-specific: the animals are most active in the first two hours, and December is the start of the busiest stretch of the Manuel Antonio year, so the 7:00 a.m. entry is the one where the trails are still quiet. With last entry at 2:00 p.m. and closing at 3:00 p.m., a late-morning arrival gives you the hottest and emptiest hours.
You do not legally need one, and whether it is worth $30 is the real question. The honest answer is that the difference is the scope and the eyes. A sloth thirty metres up in a cecropia reads as a lump of moss to an untrained eye; through a Swarovski scope it reads as a sloth with a baby on its chest. In the month when the park is at its fullest, a guide also decides which trail to take and when, which is worth something on its own.
Book the guide now and the ticket when your two-month window opens. That order matters. Guides book out before tickets do in December: the park sells a fixed daily quota that resets every day, while there is a finite number of certified guides in Manuel Antonio and they are the first thing to run out. Booking in the wrong order is the most common way people lose the date their whole trip was built around.
Move to the Wednesday or the Monday. Those are the two adjacent days that always work, and in December 2026 there is no week where both are unavailable. If you have already booked a tour with us for a Tuesday, message us and we will move it at no cost — the closed-Tuesday rule is ours to know, not yours.
Yes. Cancel 72 hours or more before the tour and you get a full refund. Inside 72 hours, message us on WhatsApp and we will do what we can; in practice a reschedule is almost always easier than a cancellation, and in December it is usually a matter of moving you to a different departure on the same day.
Send us the date and the number of people on WhatsApp at +506 8514 1361 and we confirm the same day, or use the December booking page. We will also tell you the exact SINAC ticket window for your date, so you can buy the entrance the morning it opens.