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Costa Rica
Costa Rica abolished its military entirely in 1948, redirecting the resulting budget toward education, healthcare, and — significantly for its later tourism identity — environmental conservation, a policy legacy that's helped the country protect roughly a quarter of its national territory in parks and reserves despite covering just 0.03 percent of the Earth's landmass. That conservation commitment has made Costa Rica home to an estimated 5 percent of the world's biodiversity, an extraordinary concentration for a country its size, and the term "ecotourism" itself is widely credited as having been popularized substantially through Costa Rica's early and sustained investment in nature-based, conservation-minded tourism infrastructure beginning in the 1980s and '90s. The country's Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, a high-altitude tropical forest permanently shrouded in mist, and its extensive network of volcano national parks, including the active Arenal Volcano, give visitors direct access to ecosystems and geological features found in relatively few other accessible tourist destinations worldwide. Costa Rica's combination of abolishing its military to help fund conservation, its outsized share of global biodiversity, and its foundational role in popularizing ecotourism as a travel category has made it one of the most consistently recommended destinations for nature-focused international travel.
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Iceland
Iceland sits directly atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, giving the country an extraordinary concentration of active volcanoes, geothermal hot springs, and geysers — including Geysir, the geological feature from which the English word "geyser" itself directly derives. The country's tourism industry grew dramatically following the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which grounded European air travel for days and generated enormous international media coverage that, counterintuitively, introduced millions of people to Iceland's landscape and helped trigger a tourism boom over the following decade. Iceland's position near the Arctic Circle makes it one of the most reliable and accessible places in the world to view the aurora borealis during winter months, while its near-constant summer daylight around the solstice offers the opposite seasonal extreme, giving the country two genuinely distinct travel seasons built around opposite light conditions. Iceland's combination of its extraordinary volcanic and geothermal geology, a tourism boom triggered by its own famous volcanic eruption, and reliable access to the northern lights has made it one of the fastest-growing and most distinctively dramatic destinations for international travel over the past fifteen years.
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