One morning in the dry season you drive to town and every hillside has gone gold. Trees that were bare grey sticks yesterday are solid yellow today, no leaves, just flowers, and the road under each one is carpeted. Four days later it is gone.
Where you’ll see it
Dry forest, pasture and town streets across Guanacaste. The bloom is synchronised across a whole area, often triggered by a stray dry-season rain, so when one goes they all go.
What to know
The corteza amarilla is the most spectacular of the dry forest trees and the one everybody photographs. It flowers on bare wood at the height of the dry season, the trumpet-shaped blooms opening together over a couple of days and falling together a few days after. If you see it starting, drop everything and go look. It does not wait.
