Manuel Antonio National Park is one of the few national parks in Costa Rica where a wheelchair user, a person with a walker, a grandparent who tires quickly, or a family pushing a stroller can actually see sloths, monkeys and the Pacific without being carried over roots and stairs. The park has two flat, elevated boardwalks and a wide main trail with universal-access sections. This page explains exactly which trails work, which of our four tour options fits a guest with reduced mobility, what it costs, and what is honestly difficult — because the wrong tour choice here ruins a morning and no refund fixes that.
We are Wakoo Tours, a local guiding company based in Quepos, at the park gate. We run the tour every operating day of December 2026 and January 2027 except the Tuesdays the park closes. If you want to talk it through with a human before booking, write to us on WhatsApp at +506 8514 1361 — tell us the exact mobility situation and we will tell you honestly whether the tour works.
Yes, partially — and more than almost any other national park in Costa Rica. The park has built two flat elevated boardwalks specifically for universal access, plus a wide main trail. What is not accessible is the rest of the park: the Cathedral Point loop, the Gemelas Beach trail and La Trampa involve stairs, roots and steep grades that no wheelchair can do. So the honest answer is that a wheelchair user can do a real wildlife tour here on roughly the first flat third of the park, and cannot do the lookout loops. The wildlife does not care which trail you are on — sloths, capuchins, howler monkeys and agoutis live along the accessible boardwalks, which is why this works at all.
Plan for the accessible core, not for the whole map. A guest in a wheelchair with a private guide typically sees more animals in two flat hours than a walking visitor who rushes the whole loop without a guide, because spotting is about a trained eye and a telescope, not distance covered.
Three surfaces in the park are usable with reduced mobility, and they are the ones our guides build the route around:
One caveat we will not hide: on the Perezoso boardwalk the grade is mostly gentle, but there are short estimated sections above 12% that a wheelchair or stroller user may not be able to pass without a push from a companion. If your group is one wheelchair user travelling alone with no one able to assist on a short ramp, tell us on WhatsApp first and we will route you on the Mangrove boardwalk and the Main Trail instead, where that issue does not appear.
Book a private tour. This is the one recommendation on this page we make without hedging, and it is not an upsell — it is the difference between a good morning and a bad one. A shared group tour walks at the group’s pace, and the group’s pace is set by whoever wants to reach Cathedral Point. A guest in a wheelchair, or an 80-year-old, or a family with a stroller, ends up either rushed or left behind at a bench.
On a private tour the route is yours. The guide skips the stairs entirely, spends the time on the two boardwalks, stops as often as you need, and turns back whenever you say so without asking anyone else’s permission. Our Classic Private at $69 per person is the option most families with a mobility need choose. Our V.I.P. Private at $100 per person adds a smaller-group experience with more flexibility on start time, which matters if getting someone ready in the morning takes longer than a hotel breakfast allows.
The Classic Group tour at $30 per person and the Premium shared tour at $65 per person are excellent tours and we sell them every day — but they are shared, and we will tell you directly that we do not recommend a shared tour as the first choice for a guest with reduced mobility.
These are our four published prices per person for the guided tour, and they are the same prices a walking guest pays — there is no accessibility surcharge and there never will be:
The guide fee is separate from the park entrance ticket, which is paid to the national park service, not to us. Budget both numbers when you compare us against any other quote — a price that looks lower than $30 is usually a price that has quietly left the ticket out.
Yes. The park entrance ticket is $18.08 per adult, paid to SINAC, the Costa Rican national park service. It is not included in the guide fee, and no tour operator in Manuel Antonio can waive it or discount it. Children under 2 do not pay; the reduced children’s rate and the exact age brackets are published on our main Manuel Antonio National Park guided tour page.
There is no accessibility discount on the ticket, and there is no accessible-entrance surcharge either. The park does not rent wheelchairs at the gate, so bring your own chair or let us know in advance and we will help you arrange a rental in Quepos before your tour date.
Usually yes, but not always, and this is where accessible trips go wrong. SINAC sells park tickets online on a rolling window of roughly two months ahead, and high-season mornings in December and January are the slots that sell out first. If you are travelling with a guest who needs a specific start time — a morning slot before the heat, or an afternoon slot after a medication schedule — that specific slot is the thing that disappears, not the day itself.
Our practical rule for guests with a mobility need: lock the date as soon as the two-month window opens for it, because you have less flexibility to move to a random hour than an average visitor does. Message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you which slots are still open for your dates and handle the ticket with the guide booking so you are not managing two reservations.
The park closes every Tuesday. For the December 2026 – January 2027 high season, that means these nine dates have no tours at all — ours or anybody’s:
Every other day in both months operates normally. If your itinerary has only one free day in Manuel Antonio and it lands on one of those nine Tuesdays, move the park day — do not plan an accessible trip around a closed gate. On a Tuesday we can still take you on the mangrove boat tour, which is boarded from a flat dock and is one of the better options in the area for reduced mobility.
The guided tour runs about two to three hours. On a private tour you can stop whenever you want and turn back whenever you want, and nobody will hurry you. That is the single most valuable thing a private guide gives a guest with limited stamina — not extra information, but permission to go slowly.
In practice, most wheelchair and reduced-mobility guests spend their time between the entrance, the Perezoso boardwalk and the Mangrove boardwalk, with benches roughly every 50 metres to rest in the shade. If somebody in the group is having a hard day, the guide shortens the route rather than cancelling it. You do not lose the tour because you could not finish the map.
For a stroller: yes, and the Mangrove boardwalk at 2.4 metres wide is the easiest pushing surface in the park. For an elderly parent who walks but tires: yes, and this is one of the most common bookings we take — the benches every 50 metres and the flat boardwalks are what makes it work. For a guest with a heart condition, a respiratory condition or heat sensitivity: probably yes, with two honest warnings. First, it is hot and humid; the shade on the boardwalks helps, but the heat is real and a morning start is meaningfully cooler than midday. Second, we are guides, not medical staff, and there is no clinic inside the park. Book a private tour, tell your guide the situation at the start, and carry whatever medication you need on you rather than in a bag in the car.
We will never promise you will see a specific animal. Sloths, monkeys and toucans are wild and they move. What we can say from experience is that the flat accessible section of Manuel Antonio is dense sloth habitat, and that a guide with a telescope on that stretch is far more likely to find you a sloth than a long walk without one.
Bathrooms are near the entrance area, which is the part of the park with the flattest access — so plan that stop at the start and the end rather than mid-route. Shade is good along both boardwalks, which run under canopy; the beach ends of the trails are exposed, so bring a hat and reef-safe sunscreen. The Main Trail’s universal-access sections carry you toward the beach area, but soft sand itself is not wheelchair terrain without a beach chair, which the park does not provide. Set that expectation before you go: the accessible experience here is jungle wildlife and a Pacific view, not rolling onto the sand.
Bring water. Do not bring single-use plastic or food the park does not allow, and never feed a monkey — the capuchins near the beaches have learned to open bags, and a group distracted by a monkey stealing lunch is a group not watching where a wheelchair is going.
Two ways, both of which reach a real person in Quepos:
If after reading this page you think the park is not the right fit for your group, tell us and we will say so rather than sell you a tour you will not enjoy. That is why this page exists: nobody else in Manuel Antonio writes down which boardwalk is 2.4 metres wide and which grade is above 12%, and that is exactly the detail an accessible trip is decided on.
Not a wheelchair question but a health one? We answer it condition by condition — pregnancy, over 70, bad knees, asthma, heart conditions, plus-size, fear of heights, motion sickness, toddlers and solo travellers — on our Manuel Antonio park tour with health conditions page, with the same measured trail figures.