Landing at Liberia (LIR): How to Handle Your First Day

Liberia sits a little over ten degrees north of the equator. That geography does something to your holiday that no amount of planning undoes: the sun sets between about 5:17pm and 6:10pm, every day of the year, and Costa Rica does not move its clocks. In mid-December the sun is down at 5:23pm and it is properly dark by a quarter to six.

Nearly everything that goes wrong on a first day in Guanacaste traces back to that. Not the paperwork, not the queue — the light. So the useful way to think about arrival day is backwards, from sunset.

Liberia is a small airport that handles a lot of people. It opened its current terminal in 2012 with 14 routes and 14 airlines; in 2025 it moved 1,973,831 passengers on 26 direct international routes with 12 airlines. One building, one arrivals hall. The 2018 expansion bought it exactly one additional baggage carousel.

The sequence itself is short, and the airport publishes it plainly:

Four steps, and on a quiet afternoon you can be outside in half an hour. The variable is not the process, it is how many wide-bodies landed in the hour before yours. A single terminal absorbing several North American arrivals in the same window produces the queue people remember, and no amount of being near the front of your own aircraft changes that.

The airport lists exactly three requirements for all visitors, and the third is the one people are unprepared for:

Have the hotel or villa address on your phone before you join the queue, written out, not buried in a booking email you will need signal to open. Airport Wi-Fi is free and terminal-wide on the VINCI Airports Wifi network, but connecting to it while an officer waits is a poor use of the moment.

On passports: Costa Rica sorts nationalities into four groups under Decree No. 36626-G. The first and second groups need no visa at all. Required remaining validity runs from 1 day for the first group, to 3 months for the second, to 6 months for the third and fourth. Most travellers from North America and western Europe fall in the first two groups, but the grouping is official and worth checking against your own passport rather than assuming.

There are ATMs on the 2nd level of the passenger terminal and currency exchange in the central lobby, at baggage claim and in the boarding lounges. Take out some colones before you leave, even if you intend to spend dollars all week. Dollars are widely accepted on the coast; they are not accepted by the small things — a roadside fruit stand, a parking attendant, the toll on a private road. Those are colón transactions and they turn up on day one.

The other two-minute job is to look at your ticket and find out whether the $29 departure tax is included in the fare. Most airlines include it. If yours does not, you pay it at the Banco de Costa Rica desk in the airport lobby before check-in — and the morning you fly home, at six in the morning, with bags, is the wrong time to learn that. Check it now while you are standing in the building.

The rental desks are inside the terminal and the transport options are in the arrivals area. The airport’s own advice is worth repeating verbatim: use only authorised transport, identified “by their official credentials and company uniforms”. It names three legitimate categories — private transportation, official red taxis, and car rentals.

If you are renting, the thing that delays people at the counter is not the car. It is the mandatory third-party liability insurance that is not in the price you were quoted online, and the conversation about it. We wrote that up separately in the Costa Rica car rental insurance guide — read it before you land, because the counter is a bad place to be doing arithmetic for the first time.

If you have pre-booked a private transfer, the driver meets you in arrivals with a sign. If you have not booked anything and it is high season, the arrivals hall at 4pm is a poor negotiating position. Our guide to getting around Guanacaste covers when a car earns its keep and when it is a liability.

Now put the two halves together: roughly an hour in the airport, then the drive. Against a 5:20pm sunset — which is what November through January gives you — the day looks like this.

The column that matters is the one on the right. A 2½-hour drive to Nosara that starts at 4:30pm is not a 2½-hour drive — the final approach to several of these towns is unpaved, unlit, and shared with livestock, cyclists and pedestrians in dark clothing. Doing it on the first night, in a car you have never driven, after a day of flying, is where arrival day stops being an inconvenience and becomes a risk.

Do not book a tour for your arrival day. Not a catamaran, not a volcano, not a sunset sail. Flights are delayed, bags are slow, and almost every tour here departs in the morning or at midday — the hours your arrival will eat. A missed tour is usually a non-refundable one.

Day one has a natural shape and it is worth letting it happen: get through the airport, get the car or the transfer, stop once at a supermarket, reach the place you are sleeping while you can still see, and eat somewhere you can walk to. That is a full day. Book the good stuff for day two, when you know where you are and what time the sun goes down.

If you are still choosing where to base yourself, where to stay in Guanacaste weighs the main towns, and LIR vs SJO covers the drive times behind the table above.