Should Your Rental Car Ride the Ferry to Montezuma?

The ferry is the easy part. The real question is what the car does after you land.

Article Marta Davi · September 29, 2026 · 8 min read

Eight boats a day cross the Gulf of Nicoya. The road from Paquera down to Montezuma is paved the whole way. And the town at the end of it is small enough to walk from one end to the other while your coffee is still hot.

Getting to Montezuma is not the hard part of a Montezuma trip.

The decision that actually matters is narrower, and almost nobody answers it. It is whether the rental car you drive onto that ferry earns its keep once you drive it off.

The short answer

Put the car on the ferry if Montezuma is one stop on a longer peninsula route, if your hotel sits up one of the steep side roads above town, or if you want the hours of the day that no bus covers.

Leave it behind if Montezuma is your base for the week. The town's own visitor guide describes its hotels, restaurants, beaches and waterfall trail as walking distance, and public buses connect Montezuma with Cobano, Cabuya and Cabo Blanco. A car parked outside your hotel for six days is an expensive way to not use something.

Most guides to this route lay out five ways to arrive, then hand you a rental car for "flexibility" without ever saying what the flexibility is for. In Montezuma the answer is unusually specific, and it is worth knowing before you pay for the vehicle slot.

The ferry times, from the company that runs the boat

Naviera Tambor has held the Puntarenas to Paquera concession since 1992. It publishes its own timetable, and that page is the one to trust. Read on 25 September 2026, the posted schedule, marked effective from 20 April 2026 until further notice, runs eight departures a day in each direction.

Source: Naviera Tambor, horarios y tarifas, read 25 September 2026.

Here is why we are naming the source instead of just printing the times. Schedules on this crossing drift, and old ones stay online for years. On the day we checked, one of the most widely read English guides to this exact route listed a 3:00 pm boat as a 2:30 pm boat. Thirty minutes sounds like nothing until it is the difference between pulling into Montezuma in daylight and meeting an unfamiliar hill road after dark.

Check the operator's page the week you travel, not the month you book.

The company describes the route as eleven nautical miles across the gulf. Montezuma's official visitor page puts the crossing itself at roughly an hour and a half. Either way, it is the one stretch of the journey where nobody has to drive, and the sun deck is genuinely one of the better hours of the trip.

What the crossing costs

Naviera Tambor publishes its fares in colones. Vehicle rates carry tax on top; passenger rates are listed flat.

Source: Naviera Tambor, horarios y tarifas, read 25 September 2026. We are quoting colones because that is the currency the operator publishes, and any dollar figure we printed would be wrong by the time you read it.

Look at the shape of that table rather than the individual numbers. Walking on costs about the price of a soda. Driving on costs roughly fourteen adult fares before tax. The crossing is not what makes a car expensive on this trip, but it is the moment the question becomes real, because you are paying separately for the vehicle and you can see exactly what it is costing you.

After the boat: Paquera to Montezuma

Montezuma sits 41 km southwest of Paquera and 8 km south of the town of Cobano. The visitor guide puts the drive from the ferry dock at about 50 minutes, on pavement the whole way.

It is a pretty road and a slow one. It climbs, it bends, and it drops back toward the coast, which is why so many arrival stories mention carsickness in the back seat rather than potholes. If anyone in your group reads the map and feels queasy, that is the segment they are reacting to, and it is the same segment whether you drive it yourself, ride a shuttle or take the bus.

In town the roads are paved. Some of the side roads climbing away from the beach are not, and a few hotels sit up them. That is the single most useful question to ask your hotel before you book any vehicle: what does your road want.

What the car actually buys you

Once you are in Montezuma, a car does three jobs. It is worth checking whether you need any of them.

It carries you onward. Santa Teresa, Mal Pais, Cabuya, Tambor. If Montezuma is one stop in a southern Nicoya loop rather than the destination, the car is doing real work and the ferry fare is a rounding error against it.

It runs the Cobano errands. Cobano, 8 km north, is where the practical business of this corner of the peninsula happens. Doing that on a bus timetable is possible. Doing it on your own schedule is easier.

It buys the hours the bus does not cover. The Montezuma to Cabuya bus, per the town's visitor page, runs Tuesday through Sunday, leaving Montezuma at 8:10 am, 10:30 am and 4:00 pm, and leaving Cabuya at 7:20 am, 9:30 am and 3:15 pm. That is a workable way to reach Cabo Blanco for a morning, as long as you have read the return times before you set out. Small local timetables change, so confirm at your hotel the day before.

And here is what a car does not buy you. It does not buy the beach, which is at the end of the street. It does not buy the waterfall trail, which starts in town. It does not buy dinner. For a couple spending a week in Montezuma, those are most of the days.

Three ways to arrive without one

Fly to Tambor. Montezuma's visitor page puts the flight at about 25 minutes from either San Jose or Liberia on Sansa or Costa Rica Green Airways, with Montezuma roughly 25 minutes further by road. It is the fastest door to door option on the board, and the aircraft are small, which some people love and some people do not.

Take the boat from Jaco. A taxi boat leaves Jaco daily at 10:45 am and lands on Montezuma beach about an hour later, per the same page. If you are already on the central Pacific coast, this skips the gulf, the ferry queue and the mountain road in one move. It is also, by some distance, the most enjoyable arrival in this article.

Bus and ferry. Transportes Cobano leaves Terminal 7-10 in central San Jose at 6:00 am daily. It is long and it involves the crossing, and it costs a fraction of everything else.

Shuttles, shared or private, are the fourth path. Most of them take the ferry too, which means you get the crossing without owning the timing problem.

If you are flying into Liberia instead

Different answer. The visitor guide puts Liberia to Montezuma at about three hours by road down the eastern side of the peninsula, with no ferry involved at all. From Guanacaste the crossing is a detour rather than a shortcut, so if you are choosing between airports and Montezuma is the anchor of the trip, that changes the arithmetic.

Plan the last morning before you plan the first

This is the part travelers forget. Departure day from Montezuma runs on the same timetable that got you in, and the return options thin out earlier than you expect.

The Transportes Cobano bus leaves Montezuma for San Jose once a day, at 12:15 pm. Tambor flights run on fixed schedules. And if you are driving back, you are catching one of eight ferries from Paquera, plus the 50 minutes to reach it, plus whatever Route 27 is doing that afternoon.

An early international departure out of San Jose almost always means sleeping somewhere closer to the airport the night before. Work that backwards before you lock your final night in Montezuma, not after.

Ask us

If you tell us your landing airport, your landing hour and how many nights you have in Montezuma, we can tell you fairly quickly whether the car earns its place on that ferry or just rides along. It usually comes down to two things: what is on either side of Montezuma in your itinerary, and what your hotel's road looks like.

Message us with those details and we will work it through with you. We would rather talk you out of a vehicle you will not use than watch it sit in a parking space for a week.

More on moving around the country: our honest comparison of rental cars, shuttles and buses in Costa Rica covers the same tradeoff nationally. If you are pairing Montezuma with somewhere else on the peninsula, the Nosara travel guide covers the Nicoya coast further north. And if your dates fall between May and November, read Costa Rica in green season before you decide what you are driving. First trip to the country at all? Start with things to know before visiting Costa Rica.