The Stone Spheres of Finca 6
United Fruit crews clearing banana land in 1939 found stone balls buried in the Diquis Delta, heard a rumor that they held gold, and drilled and dynamited several open. The people who carved them were gone within a generation of the Spanish conquest, so no account of why they exist survives.
Field Guide Entry
The spheres came out of the ground in 1939, when United Fruit Company crews were clearing jungle in the Diquis Delta for banana plantations. Word went around that there was gold inside them. Several were drilled and blown apart before anyone thought to ask what they were.
Doris Stone, the daughter of a United Fruit executive, published the first account in American Antiquity in 1943 and brought Harvard's Samuel Lothrop to the delta. Roughly 300 spheres are known. Some are close to 2 meters across and weigh many tons. They are cut from gabbro, which does not outcrop anywhere nearby, so the stone was moved before it was shaped.
What was lost with the carvers
Almost every sphere in Costa Rica has been moved. They were hauled off to decorate hospital lawns, bank forecourts, and private gardens, which is why they turn up all over the country in places they were never meant to be. Finca 6 is the only site where they still stand in the straight-line alignments their makers left them in, which is the single reason the site is protected.
John Hoopes of the University of Kansas, who assessed the site for UNESCO, has made the point that matters most here. The culture that carved the spheres was gone within a generation of the Spanish conquest. There is no oral tradition, no chronicle, and no descendant community that carried the knowledge forward. Nobody wrote down what they were for while anybody still knew.
What the guesses are worth
The alignments have been read as astronomical markers, as territorial boundaries, as rank display outside chiefly houses, and as nothing more than very expensive decoration. None of these has been demonstrated. What is established is the labor: the quarrying, the transport, the shaping to a near-perfect sphere by hand, repeated hundreds of times.
UNESCO inscribed the site in 2014. The Museo Nacional de Costa Rica ran a conservation campaign on the Finca 6 spheres in September 2025.
Visiting Information
Open Tuesday through Sunday, 8am to 4pm. Admission is about $7 for adult foreign visitors and $5 for students. The site has an air-conditioned exhibition hall and outdoor trails that run through the old plantation to the sphere alignments, and most people give it about 2 hours.
The drive from San Jose takes roughly 4 hours. The nearest airstrip is at Palmar Sur, a few minutes away, which is the practical option for anyone already on the Osa Peninsula. Sierpe, and the boats to Corcovado, are close enough to combine on the same trip.
The delta is hot and humid year round and the trails are open ground with little shade. Costa Rica carries a US advisory of Level 2 as of 2026.
Field Gallery
No approved field photos yet. You could be first.
Community Notes
No community notes yet.
Explore More Mysteries
America's Stonehenge
A hillside maze of stone chambers, walls, and a grooved "sacrificial table" in New Hampshire has been called both a 4,000-year-old ceremonial site and a 19th-century farmer's root cellars. A century of argument has not settled it.
Aramu Muru / Gate of the Gods
A seven-meter doorway carved into a sandstone cliff above Lake Titicaca is where legend says a fleeing Inca priest pressed a golden solar disk into the rock and vanished through a portal that opened in front of him, and visitors still press their foreheads into the niche to feel what he might have felt.
Areni-1 Cave
This cave produced the oldest leather shoe on Earth and the oldest known winery. The part nobody repeats is what stood beside the wine vat: storage jars with the heads of adolescents inside them, and one skull that still held brain tissue.
Arkaim
Found by accident in 1987 during a dam survey, this circular Bronze Age fortress in the Ural steppe was built with gates and doorways researchers say align to eighteen solar and lunar events, a claim, if accurate, of more precise astronomical design than Stonehenge.