Batambal sits a few kilometres from Ciudad Cortés in the lowland of the Diquís delta, a patch of flat, green, humid country that you could easily ride straight through without knowing what lay under the grass. It is one of the four sites that make up the UNESCO listing for the stone spheres of southern Costa Rica, a recognition that came in 2014 for the remains of chiefdoms that flourished here long before the Spanish. At Batambal, as elsewhere, the spheres lie among the low, rounded foundations of the houses and mounds those people built.
What stays with you is the sense of scale and of care. Making a perfect ball of stone with no metal tools, and then hauling it across the delta, takes enormous patience, and the finished spheres were evidently important to those who made them. Researchers believe they marked rank and sacred space, not simply decoration, and some seem to have been laid out in relation to each other and the sunrise. The land around is now farmland, but a walk past a sphere in the heat of the day, with the cicadas going, is oddly moving.
The ride in is easy, mostly through the flat farmland south of the mountains, and it is hot. The Pan-American Highway and its side roads pass through fields of palm and rice, with trucks and local buses and the odd cyclist. The Térraba and Sierpe rivers wind through the delta, with mangrove-fringed channels that carry boats towards the Pacific, and the Osa Peninsula lies further south. In the wet season, roads here can flood, and a muddy track can become a puddle on short notice.
Ciudad Cortés has the closest shops, and the larger town of Buenos Aires, about twenty-seven kilometres north, is the safer bet for fuel and a proper meal. Bring water, a hat and a sense of humour about the humidity, and aim to arrive in the morning, when the heat is kind and the light is soft on the stones.