Tourist Visa

Canadians don’t need a tourist visa for Costa Rica. An excerpt from CostaRica.com:

If you hold a valid passport from your home country, you may enter Costa Rica without a tourist visa and can stay up to 90 days.
You only need the following documents to enter Costa Rica:
    * a valid passport with at least one blank visa page. The expiration date of your passport must be greater than 30 days from your date of entry to Costa Rica.
    * a pre-paid airline ticket to exit Costa Rica or proof of financial resources ($400.00 US - $1,000.00 US in cash or traveler checks, and/or a ticket to either return to your home country or to go to another country)

When we arrived in Costa Rica in July, all of our passports were stamped with a 90-day visa.

As a tourist you have two choices to extend your stay in Costa Rica:

   1.     File for an extension of stay at the Department of Temporary Permits & Extension of Stays at the Immigration Department in Costa Rica.

   2.     Cross the border to one of Costa Rica's neighboring countries - ensuring that the port of exit official stamps your passport with the exit seal; and then come back in to the country 72 hours later.  When you re-enter Costa Rica you will be granted another 30, 60, or 90 days to stay as a tourist.

To renew our visas, we opted for #2 above.

We had decided to take a one-week vacation and researched heading to a nearby country like

Panama (on the southern border of Costa Rica) or Guatemala (south of Mexico). Amazingly, it was way more expensive to fly the whole family to one of these close countries than to fly to the US with a cheap carrier like Spirit Airlines. It almost seems hard to believe that we were able to fly one-way to Fort Lauderdale, Florida per person for $9 (yes, you read that right, I am not missing any zeroes). Of course, for a mere $9 flight, you don’t get anything free on the plane but then again, the more expensive carriers don’t offer much for free nowadays either.

We had wrongfully assumed that upon reentering Costa Rica, we would be granted another 90-day visa. When we checked our passports, we discovered that the immigration officer had given us only a 60-day visa. I spoke to the Costa Rican consulate in Ottawa and the representative from Costa Rica explained the wording “up to 90 days” – a 90-day visa is the maximum that the immigration officer will grant but it is at their discretion whether they will grant you a 2-week visa or a 90-day visa or somewhere in-between.