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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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New Zealand
New Zealand's dramatic and varied landscape — fjords, glaciers, volcanic plateaus, and rolling green hills all within a relatively small island nation — made it the natural filming location for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" film trilogies, a cinematic association the country has leaned into directly as a major tourism draw ever since. Queenstown, on the South Island, has built a global reputation specifically as the birthplace of commercial bungee jumping, launched in 1988 by A.J. Hackett off the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge, and the town has since become a broader hub for adventure tourism, including skydiving, jet boating, and skiing. The country's Māori culture remains a genuinely living and visible part of national identity rather than a purely historical curiosity, with the Māori language holding official status alongside English, and cultural experiences including traditional haka performances and hāngī feasts widely offered as a core part of the visitor experience rather than a separate niche attraction. New Zealand's combination of its "Lord of the Rings" cinematic landscape, its status as the birthplace of commercial bungee jumping and broader adventure tourism, and a genuinely living Māori cultural presence has made it one of the most distinctive and consistently recommended long-haul destinations for international travelers.
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