Isla Nublar

"I own an island. Off the coast of Costa Rica."

Isla Nublar is a remote island about 120 miles (190 km) off the west coast of Costa Rica, which is only 87 miles away from Isla Sorna. The island has a surface of 57 square kilometers (22 square miles). Its mountain ridges created varied ecological niches.^[1]

The island was intended to be the site of Jurassic Park. It was to be a tourist attraction featuring living biological dinosaurs cloned from prehistoric DNA. The park was closed and abandoned before it could open due to multiple containment breaches, but was later reclaimed and successfully served as the site of a new tourist park, Jurassic World, until another containment breach.

Name

Isla Nublar means "clouded island", though phonetically its name is incorrect, and should be "Isla Nublada". Nublar means "to cloud", so the name translates to "Cloud Island". Its name is most likely an allusion to the Costa Rican island Isla del Coco, which is the only island with cloud forests in the eastern Pacific.

Location and physical geography

Like its novel version Isla Nublar has the shape of a reversed teardrop. The precise geography of the island is shown in satellite imagery in the Jurassic Park Control Room (image featured far left below). Various other maps such as the maps featured in the brochure, the Tour the Island site and Jurassic World map show a stylized cartoon version of Isla Nublar and therefore give only vague detail to the island's topography.

There is continual range of highlands along the western coast of the island, called the Western Ridge.^[2] Velvet green cliffs and cascading waterfalls plummeting into deep, narrow valleys. From these mountains, one or more rivers stream to the eastern part of the island.

The northern part of the island is also very mountainous. This part is also very volcanic. One of the most impressive mountains on the island is called Sibo. It is called after the main deity of the Tun-Si tribe. He was believed to have created the Earth. The mountain itself has the shape of a house and the natives believed that the animals of the world had built it.

History

Before InGen

Thousands of years ago people from the American continent arrived at Isla Nublar.^[3] They evolved into a Bribri tribe that called themselves Tun-Si (Water Men). The Tun-Si were mostly fishermen.^[4] Nima Cruz is a member of this tribe.

The Spanish navigator Diego Fernandez was the first European to discover the island in 1525. The naming of Isla Nublar is often credited to cartographer Nicolas de Huelva. While mapping the western coast of Costa Rica on the Spanish carrack La Estrella (The Star), de Huelva described seeing a "cloud island" ("Isla Nublar"). However, the Tun-Si people call the island Guá-Si (Water House, or, House beyond Water).^[4]

InGen

After John Hammond abandoned the idea of a small Jurassic Park: San Diego, his company InGen looked for a large isolated preserve. Costa Rica agreed to lease the island to InGen. The Tun-Si tribe was fully displaced from the island in 1987.

InGen had to build two docks to easily transport supplies and workmen to the island, the North Docks and East Docks. In the south also a Isla Nublar Heliport was built. For an efficient distribution, a network of roads was built. To supply the construction sites and the fences with energy, a Geothermal Power Plant was built in the northern mountains.

The structures for Jurassic Park were mainly built in the eastern and northern part of the island. When the Electric Fences around the paddocks were built, dinosaurs from Isla Sorna were transported to the Isla Nublar.

For a complete discussion of all buildings of the Park, see Jurassic Park (movie park).

InGen Incident

During a tropical storm, Nedry hacked into InGen and uploaded a virus that shut down the power and unleashed the dinosaur population onto the people on the island. In the end, 13 people, including Nedry, had died and all dinosaurs on the island were unleashed and all survivors were sworn to secrecy, although Malcolm went against this and tried to reveal what had happened only to become an outcast, and the island was kept from the public for years, until the San Diego Incident, although some people confused the two islands as one.

In The Marine Facility, Billy Yoder tells that the American army would send a group of B-52s to "sink this island into the Pacific!" In Ethics, Part 2, Haskell says that the people have 90 minutes to leave the island. However, the Napalm bombing is never seen on screen.

In the (deleted) Boardroom Scene of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Peter Ludlow gives a hint on what happened on the island:

Demolition, de-construction, and disposal of Isla Nublar facilities, organic and inorganic, one hundred and twenty-six million dollars.^[5]

The back of the TLW VHS box set tells:

The dinosaurs are destroyed, the park is dismantled and the island is indefinitely closed for the public...

From these sources, it is clear that the Isla Nublar facilities and dinosaurs were removed from the island. How this happened, is unknown. The VHS cover seems to indicate that the dinosaurs were killed, rather than transported. However, the VHS text says that the island still exists.

It is unknown whether or not the island was napalmed. Dialogue from Jurassic Park The Game suggests that it was intended to be and dialogue from the deleted scene from The Lost World: Jurassic Park agrees with this, however the T. rex in Jurassic World has been confirmed to be the same one from the original film.

Jurassic World

Sometime after the events of Jurassic Park III, Simon Masrani, the new CEO of InGen following John Hammond's passing, built a new, much larger dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, in the southern part of Isla Nublar. The park started off with 8 species of dinosaurs that possibly came from the original park, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex, but over the years the number of species on the island grew to 20. Many of the buildings of the old park, like the Visitor Center^[6], are still on the island, but are overgrown by the jungle and inaccessible to park guests.

The park opened with over 90,000 visitors in 2005 but by 2015, visitor count went to 20,000 tourists a day. The investors knew that each time the park added a new dinosaur, attendance spiked so they decided to begin creating genetically altered dinosaurs that could wow the crowds. And thus the Indominus rex came to be. Once it was announced to the public, ticket sales and preorders skyrocketed, however, the Indominus rex eventually escaped and caused chaos all over the park, resulting in the deaths of at least 20 people, including Masrani himself, and many more were gravely injured following the escape of the Dimorphodons and Pteranodons from the Jurassic World Aviary. Although the hybrid was killed in the end, the park suffered an enormous amount of damage and was shut down, leaving the island abandoned yet again.