Montezuma Waterfall is three falls stacked almost one on top of another in the forest behind the beach village it is named for, at the southern tip of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. Each has a pool of its own. The path leaves the village and follows the river up over roots and boulders, through humid forest loud with insects and birds. In about twenty minutes it puts you at the foot of the largest of the three. It drops 24 metres in a white column into a wide basin between rock walls, cool and clear enough to see the rounded stones on the bottom. You can float there while the whole weight of it pounds down in front of you. The jumping is not done here. It happens above the main fall, where ledges over the upper pool step from a couple of metres up to about ten and a rope swing hangs over the water. The scramble up there leaves most of the day visitors behind.
If you go quietly the forest fills in around you: a collared aracari clattering in the canopy, squirrels running the branches, and the white-throated magpie-jay, blue and white with a curling crest, calling through the trees in the cool of the morning. Those jays keep unusual households. Daughters stay with their mother for years to help raise the next brood while the sons leave, which is rare among birds. A few minutes the other way the forest opens onto long, near-empty sand with tide pools scattered along a rocky Pacific shore, so the roar of the falls and the sound of the surf belong to the same morning. And the reason there is still forest above the village is a few kilometres down that coast. Cabo Blanco was set aside in 1963 as the first protected reserve in the country, after a Swedish-Danish couple who had settled near here in the 1950s watched the peninsula being cleared and campaigned to save its tip. Every national park Costa Rica is now admired for grew from that one.