It Must Have Been Well Hidden.

Geologists have discovered a new volcano in Costa Rica:

Just 170 kilometers north of Costa Rica’s capital city of San José, scientists have confirmed the existence of the country’s 250th volcano. Located in the San Carlos canton, the newly found volcano sits at a lofty 2,300 meters above sea level. Its crater measures 200 meters in diameter, about the same size of Irazú and approximately eight times the size of Turrialba Volcano’s active center.


The volcano sits at the Cerro El Porvenir — Porvenir (Future) Mountain — and has been determined to be dormant. Its presence was first discovered in 2006, hidden in the virgin forest of the Parque Nacional del Agua Juan Castro Blanco. A NASA airplane had taken infrared photographs of the area, showing evidence of two geologic faults and some sort of hole or crater at Porvenir’s summit. After seeing the photographic evidence, scientists headed into the national park to investigate by land. Though there is still much to study and scientists look forward to determining the age of the volcano and geological footprint that it has made, the discovery was made official on March 8, 2008.


It's not really new, of course, having been there for milennia, but apparently the jungle is so dense in the area that it wasn't recognized as a volcano.

Always reassuring when even something as obvious as a volcano can go unnoticed for that long.