Getting to Montezuma: Should Your Car Ride the Ferry?

The Puntarenas to Paquera timetable, what the crossing costs, and the three honest ways to reach the tip of the Nicoya peninsula

Article Marta Davi · October 1, 2026 · 6 min read

Foot passengers always get on the ferry. Vehicles queue. That one difference is the whole decision about how you reach Montezuma, and it matters more than the road does.

Montezuma sits at the southern tip of the Nicoya peninsula, past Cobano, and there are three sensible ways to arrive: drive and put the car on the Puntarenas to Paquera ferry, ride a shuttle that meets a boat and hands you to a van on the far side, or fly into the little airstrip at Tambor up the coast. The ferry timetable shapes all three.

The short version

• Naviera Tambor posts eight departures a day in each direction between Puntarenas and Paquera: 4:00 a.m., 6:30 a.m., 9:00 a.m., 12:00 noon, 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. (navieratambor.com, schedule effective 20 April 2026, read 30 September 2026).
• The posted Naviera Tambor adult foot passenger fare is 810 colones. A light vehicle is 11,400 colones plus tax. Older adults travel free, at a posted fare of 0.
• A foot passenger walks on. A car waits in the vehicle line, and the line is the part of the day that can go wrong.
• Paquera is not Montezuma. After the crossing you still have the winding road down through Cobano, and that stretch is the slowest piece of the whole trip.
• The last crossing of the night leaves Puntarenas at 10:00 p.m., so a late landing at San Jose does not strand you. It just means arriving in Montezuma in the dark on a road you have never driven.

What the timetable actually says

The Puntarenas to Paquera ferry is run by Naviera Tambor, and its own schedule page currently shows the same eight departure times from both sides of the Gulf of Nicoya.

Source: navieratambor.com schedule and fares page, marked effective from 20 April 2026 "until further notice", read 30 September 2026.

Read those last three words again, because they are the real planning instruction. Naviera Tambor changes the timetable when it needs to, and it says so on the page. A schedule you screenshotted in February is not a schedule. Check it again the week you travel, and again the day before you cross.

What the crossing costs

Source: navieratambor.com schedule and fares page, read 30 September 2026. Vehicle fares are posted before tax, and the driver and passengers still buy their own passenger tickets.

Notice how small the passenger number is next to the vehicle number. Crossing the gulf on foot costs less than a soda in a beach town. Almost everything you are weighing here is about the car, not about you.

Should the rental car ride along?

Yes if you want to leave Montezuma during your stay: to reach Santa Teresa over the ridge, to eat in Cabuya, to drive yourself to a trailhead at dawn instead of negotiating a ride. No if Montezuma itself is the plan, because the town is small, walkable, and full of taxis and ATV rentals, and a car mostly sits.

Two things people underestimate.

The first is the vehicle line at Puntarenas. Foot passengers board; cars are accepted until the deck is full. On a Saturday in high season, or the Friday before a Costa Rican holiday, the queue is the reason people miss a sailing, not the driving. If you are bringing a car, treat the posted departure as the time the boat leaves without you.

The second is the road after Paquera. The stretch through Cobano to Montezuma is narrow, hilly and patchy in places, and it is a different kind of driving than the highway you just left. In green season rain it asks more of you. This is the part of the day when people who chose the smallest economy car start doing mental arithmetic about clearance.

If you are not driving

A shuttle is the plainest way to reach Montezuma without a steering wheel. You are a foot passenger, which means the vehicle queue is not your problem, and someone else owns the question of which sailing to aim for. You hand over your arrival hour and your bags, and you read for a while on the water.

The tradeoff is that you arrive without wheels. In Montezuma that is a smaller loss than it sounds, and for couples who came to swim, eat and sleep near the sound of surf it is often the right answer. For two couples who want Santa Teresa on Tuesday and Cabuya on Thursday, it gets expensive one ride at a time.

Public buses do connect San Jose to the peninsula through the ferry, and people travel this way every day. It is the cheapest option and the least forgiving of a delayed flight, because a missed connection on the Puntarenas side means waiting for the next sailing rather than the next bus.

What about flying in?

The nearest airstrip is at Tambor, up the coast from Montezuma, and domestic schedules there shift with the season. It is the fastest way to skip both the highway and the gulf, and the least reliable thing to build a fixed plan around months ahead. Check the carrier's current timetable directly, or ask us and we will look at the dates you actually have.

Timing a San Jose landing

Work backwards from a sailing, not forwards from the airport.

Landing in the morning or early afternoon is the easy case: collect the car or meet your driver, cross in daylight, and arrive with enough light to find your hotel. Landing in the evening gives you a real choice. The 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. departures from Puntarenas exist, and they will take you. What they hand you is an unfamiliar coastal road after midnight, at the end of a day that already started in an airport.

Sleeping near the airport and crossing on the 6:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. ferry costs you one hotel night and gives you back a whole first morning. We make the same argument for late arrivals headed north, in our guide to landing late at SJO.

The morning you leave

Plan the departure the way you planned the arrival, because this is where trips actually break. Paquera's posted departures are the same eight times. From the ferry you still have the drive to San Jose, then the airline's check in window, and none of those steps forgive each other.

If your flight home is before noon, the crossing you want is probably earlier than feels reasonable, and that is easier to accept the night before than at 5:00 a.m. Coming in green season, add the chance that rain has slowed everything down. Our green season guide covers what the rain actually does to a day here, and things to know before visiting Costa Rica covers the practical basics of driving and paying for things.

The one question worth asking us

Send us your landing time, your flight home, and whether you want to leave Montezuma during the week. That is enough for us to tell you which crossing to aim for, whether the car earns its place on the deck, and what the morning you fly out has to look like. Ask us before you book the car, not after.

Pura Vida.