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.

Name

Isla Nublar means "clouded 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.

The western coast of Isla Nublar is very rough and mountainous. 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 Nima's 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.^[2] They evolved into a Bribri tribe that called themselves Tun-Si (Water Men). The Tun-Si were mostly fisherman.^[3] 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).^[3]

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 workman 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

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.^[4]

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.

Jurassic World

Somewhere after the events of Jurassic Park III, Simon Masrani built a new dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, in the southern part of Isla Nublar. By 2015, the island is visited by 20,000 tourists a day.

Some buildings of the old park, like the Visitor Center^[5], are still on the island but are overgrown by the jungle. There's a Lagoon, that reveals there was an ocean cut through the island but was never revealed in the previous movies.