The Cemetery You Can Only Reach at Low Tide

There is a small island off the village of Cabuya, on the southern tip of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula, that keeps its own hours. Twice a day the sea pulls back and lays down a path of rock and sand across the exposed floor of the bay. For an hour or two, you can walk out to the island on foot. Then the water returns, quietly and without asking, and the island becomes an island again — reachable only by boat until the next tide.

The island is a cemetery. It has been Cabuya's burial ground for as long as most people there can remember, and it still is today. That is the part that stays with you: not that a place like this exists, but that it is not a ruin or a curiosity. It is in use. Families still carry their dead across the sea floor and bring them home.

We haven't stood on that path ourselves. What follows is a story told secondhand — carefully, from the accounts of people who know the place — because it seemed worth telling well.

Where It Is

Cabuya is a fishing village at the very bottom of the Nicoya Peninsula, tucked between the Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve and Montezuma, which is about twenty minutes up the road. It's a small place. The road runs out not far past it; Cabo Blanco, one of the oldest protected areas in Costa Rica, begins where the pavement gives up.

Just offshore lies the island — small, green, and close enough that from the village you might not think of it as separate at all. It's often described as the only island in Central America used as a cemetery. That's a hard thing to prove one way or the other, so we'll say what the sources say: it's a claim repeated widely and affectionately, the kind of detail a place likes to hold onto, and we'll leave it there rather than dress it up as a census.

The Crossing

The whole character of the place comes from the tide.

At high water, the island sits out in the bay and you'd need a boat. But when the tide draws down, a spit of rock and sand surfaces across the shallows, and the walk opens. It's a few hundred metres across the exposed sea floor — one account describes wading through water up to the knees for part of it, the way you'd cross a stream that isn't quite sure it's finished being a stream. You get roughly an hour and a half to two hours on either side of low tide before the sea closes the crossing again.

There's a plainness to that arithmetic that's easy to underestimate. You don't visit this cemetery on your own schedule. You visit it on the moon's. The tide tables decide the visiting hours, and they don't negotiate. People who go out to tend a grave or sit for a while keep half an eye on the water the whole time, the way anyone would who has watched a path disappear.

The waters right around the island are shallow and clear and sit close to the protected reserve, so the bay is known locally for snorkelling and marine life. It gives the setting an odd doubleness — a burial ground ringed by bright, busy water — but that's the coast for you. It rarely does one thing at a time.

A Cemetery Still in Use

It would be easy, and wrong, to write about this island as if it were a relic. It isn't. It is Cabuya's cemetery — the only one the village has — and funerals are still held there.

Which means the ordinary rules of respect apply, the same ones you'd bring to any cemetery anywhere. Visitors who walk out at low tide may well find themselves sharing the island with people who came for a different reason entirely: to bury someone, to tend a grave, to be quietly with their own. The right posture is the obvious one. You keep your distance, you keep your voice down, and you remember whose place this actually is. It belongs to the families of Cabuya, not to the walk out.

Crossing by Candlelight

The detail that people remember most is the night funerals.

When a burial falls after dark — timed, as everything here is, to the tide rather than the clock — mourners sometimes cross to the island carrying candles and lights. From the hills above the coast, from Cabuya itself and from Los Cedros, Delicias, and as far as Montezuma, the procession is visible out on the water: a line of small lights moving slowly across the bay. People who have seen it describe it the same way, more or less. It looks like lights walking across the water.

It's the kind of image that would feel invented if it weren't so practical. There's nothing staged about it. The tide is low, so the path is open; it's night, so you carry a light; the village comes to walk its dead across — and the result, seen from above, is quietly extraordinary. Grief and low tide and candlelight, doing exactly what they each do, adding up to something you don't forget.

Where the Story Gets Uncertain

Here is where we have to slow down and be honest, because this is where the accounts stop agreeing.

Ask how the island came to be a cemetery and you'll get more than one answer. As the story is often told locally, the island was a burial ground long before the Spanish arrived — a place used by Indigenous people, watched over, in some versions, by a village shaman. It's an old and evocative story, and it's clearly meaningful to the people who tell it.

But the documented record here is thin, and the accounts differ: the official Costa Rica tourism source gives a plainer, more recent origin — a death in the surrounding waters, a boating accident, after which locals began burying their dead on the island. Other retellings add dates — pre-Columbian times, the 1700s — that we simply can't stand behind, because they aren't reliably sourced.

So we'll do the honest thing and leave the question open. The deep-origin story is local tradition, worth knowing as tradition; the tidier tourism-board version is one more account among several; and the truth is that no one writing about this island — including us — can tell you with certainty how it began. That uncertainty isn't a flaw in the story. It's part of its texture. A place this old, this small, and this far down the peninsula was never going to hand over a clean paper trail.

What isn't uncertain is the present tense of it. Whatever started it, the island is Cabuya's cemetery now, and the village still crosses to it on foot when the sea allows.

Why It Stays With You

Most cemeteries are about permanence — stone, ground, a fixed place you can return to whenever you like. This one is about timing. The village buries its dead on ground it can only reach for a couple of hours at a stretch, and only when the sea agrees to step aside. You come when you can, you say what you came to say, and you head back before the water closes the road.

There's something clarifying in that, without anyone having to make it into a lesson. The tide sets the terms. The village works within them, and has for generations, carrying its people out across the exposed floor of the bay — sometimes by daylight, sometimes by candlelight — to a small green island that spends half its life cut off from the world and the other half briefly, quietly, joined to it.

Sources

• Visit Costa Rica (official) — "Cabuya: see what happens when the tide goes out" — visitcostarica.com/en/costa-rica/blog/cabuya-see-what-happens-when-tide-goes-out
• Atlas Obscura — "Cabuya Island Cemetery" — atlasobscura.com/places/cemetery-cabuya-island
• montezuma-costarica.com — "Isla Cementerio" page
• Costa Rica Vibes — "Cabuya Cemetery" guide — costaricavibes.com/cabuya-cemetery/

Note: accounts of the island's origin differ across these sources — from a pre-Columbian Indigenous burial ground (local tradition) to a more recent origin following a death in the surrounding waters (Visit Costa Rica). This piece flags that disagreement rather than resolving it.

Made using AI.