Festival de la Tortuga Tortuguero

Known locally as TortuFest and founded in 2008, Tortuguero's turtle festival marks the close of the green turtle nesting season with music, food, Caribbean-style parades and aquatic floats celebrating local biodiversity. Held in a boat-access-only village whose modern identity traces to zoologist Archie Carr's 1950s conservation work, which led to the area's 1970 declaration as a national park.

Tortuguero's turtle festival, often known locally as TortuFest, began in 2008 in a village whose modern identity has been shaped for decades by sea turtle conservation: American zoologist Archie Carr arrived in the 1950s drawn by reports of a beach thick with nesting green turtles, and his subsequent research led to the founding of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, work that eventually helped secure the area's 1970 declaration as a national park specifically to protect turtle nesting sites and surrounding ecosystems.