Beach Combing ~ Wildlife ~ Stone Carvings ~ Hiking

Explore miles of deserted beaches, wide sandy beaches, rocky points, tide pools, ocean lagoon. Stay up at night and encounter a majestic sea turtle as it comes to lay eggs on the beach. Discover the wildlife of the preserved habitats of mangroves and coastal forest at Los Cardones. Visit a site of indigenous stone carvings (petroglyphs).

Beach Combing

Visitors can enjoy kilometers of undeveloped beaches for beach combing, diving, swimming, surfing and fishing. A small ocean lagoon is created at low tide at the nearby beach of San Diego offering great snorkeling and wading. Join local fishermen and catch lobsters by hand in the reefs, or pick up a variety of edible shells. 

Sea turtles lay their eggs on the beach all year around.

Leatherback turtle laying eggs on our beach

Leatherback turtle laying eggs on our beach

At night. The last few turtles to hatch.

Baby turtle struggling to the ocean

Wildlife

We are preserving 7 acres of our tropical dry forest for wildlife observation including the shore of the San Maquado creek and its mangroves. It is a beautiful area typical of the wetland ecosystem of coastal Nicaragua. Both the tropical dry forest and the mangroves are precious habitats to local and migratory species. 

The caiman is often spotted in the nearby river.

This iguana is enjoying the sun on a trail.

Guardabarranco, the national bird of Nicaragua is often seen in the forest.

Hiking

In the Nicaraguan countryside people travel by foot, by horse or with oxcarts. Numerous trails connect the villages to rivers, coastal forests and estuaries where people forage, fish and hunt. Following these trails will give you a chance to experience the lifestyle of the local people and discover a variety of landscapes. 

Visitors can explore the immediate surroundings of Los Cardones on a 2km trail that runs along the San Maquado Creek to the basaltic pools then through the riverbed lined with viscoyol palms, along a cattle ranch and to a luxurious plantain plantation in the forest. 

A longer hike in the same direction will lead you to the house of Chico and Orlinda, across cornfields, along the sugar cane plantation then towards the beach through the settlement of Will Velasquez and his familly. 

As you get close to the beach you have to cross a lagoon on a makeshift bridge of logs. If it is a little slippery and you feel uneasy balancing on the partially submerged logs, you may feel comfort in the smiles of Will´s children as you are giving them a week´s worth of entertainment! 

If you timed your hike to walk this stretch of beach at low tide you are guaranteed to find a score of shells and especially the beautiful sand dollars (please don´t pick up the live ones, the ones that have hair on their shells). 

Other hikes can lead you to beautiful rivers, ocean cliffs or woods. 

Stone Carvings

The bed of the river is a basaltic lava flow (result of the continental plate convergence) on which ancient civilization carved many different drawings. From the greek 'petros'-rock and 'gluphein'-to carve, a PETROGLYPH is a drawing carved into a stone. Many of these have been carved into this basaltic rock. 

Primitive drawings have been found on every continent except Antarctica. 

Nicaragua has many petroglyph sites

What are their signification? Some are considered as the forerunners of writing, some as art while others seem to have been designed more for communication than for aesthetic pleasure. 

For more information on petroglyphs, here are some links: 
http://culturelink.info/petro/ 
http://www.rupestre.net/rockart/ 

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