"Paving Pura Vida: How Tourism is Changing the Face of Costa Rica"
Written by Celia Jackson | Photos by Natasha Walker



Every year, visions of brilliant birds and furry marsupials frolicking in a lush jungle draw thousands of people from all over the world to Costa Rica’s rainforests. But for those searching for a personal piece of paradise, fantasy gives way to the reality of tourism in the 21st century. Costa Rica is no quiet oasis of wildlife – it’s exploding with development.

Embedded between Nicaragua and Panama in Central America, Costa Rica has lured nature lovers for decades. Today, Costa Rica is known as much for its Cancun-style resorts as its exotic fauna. A growth spurt has resorts, eco-lodges and national parks jumbled like a misguided patchwork quilt, and the next generation of travelers may never know the eco-friendly Costa Rica.

Over the last decade, Costa Rica’s tourism industry grew three times the world rate—7.1 percent compared to other popular destinations, such as Hawaii’s 4.6 percent or Europe’s 3 percent.

According to Kelly Hanika, a travel agent based in Snohomish County, Wash., Central America is an up-and-coming region. She said her clients go to Costa Rica for the surf.

"Most people go to the Central Pacific region," Hanika said. "It’s an alternative to Hawaii, where the same kinds of beaches are less expensive."

For a country whose name literally means "rich coast," expensive beach resorts have become an invasive species in the landscape of Costa Rica’s tourism industry. The success of traditional ecotourism has attracted international investors looking for new, untapped markets.

Isthmus Realty, a real estate firm in Costa Rica that sells hotel, resort and vacation home properties to foreign investors, handles millions of dollars in property transactions every year, and is anticipating a 20 percent growth rate over the next few years.

"We complain about the Californians here [in Bellingham], but they’ve already been to Costa Rica and built their oversized retirement homes," said Troy Abel, assistant professor of environmental studies at Western Washington University, who has been traveling to Costa Rica annually since 2000.

Investors with extra capital chose the country because Mexico is too expensive and Nicaragua and Panama are too dangerous, Abel said. But in a country known for having the only drinkable tap water in Central America, unrestrained development has turned many beaches into open sewers, according to scientists at the Costa Rica Institute of Drainage and Aqueducts (AyA).

Jaco, a surf-town in the Central Pacific region, has tested for fecal coliform levels eight times the regulatory limit, according to AyA. Of the 30 Western Washington University students and faculty who traveled to Costa Rica in the summer of 2008 as part of Huxley College’s Rainforest Immersion Conservation Action (RICA) program, more than six were diagnosed with giardia, a serious intestinal infection caused by water-born parasites.

All along Costa Rica’s stretches of white sandy beach, resorts and sky-scraping condos are sprouting like mushrooms after a hard rain. One, the Punta Leona Beach Resort on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, is a popular getaway for urbanites from San Jose, the country’s capital. It is also part of a development company responsible for many of the condo and vacation homes in the Central Pacific region. Its slogan, splashed across billboards, reads "Costa Rica – the way it should be."

Western graduate Chris Andersen, who spent five and a half weeks in Costa Rica and stayed at eco-lodges, beach resorts and ranger stations with RICA program peers, found resorts like Punta Leona and luxury hotels like the San Jose Marriot disconnected from traditional Costa Rican living.

"You can stay in Costa Rica, but never be in Costa Rica," Andersen said.

Abel, who created the Western RICA program in 2006, said he wanted his students to experience every side of the tourism industry.

"There are underappreciated contradictions in a place like Costa Rica," Abel said. "I wanted students to experience that contradiction by sitting in opulence at a resort in Costa Rica where the only traditional item on the menu was rice and beans."

Another implication of heavy development is habitat fragmentation, said Michael Medler, an associate professor of environmental studies at Western who has traveled to Costa Rica multiple times with the RICA program.

After decades of deforestation from agriculture and logging, the development boom is further turning Costa Rica’s national park system into a series of separated islands. This may mean extinction for charismatic megafauna like the jaguar, because of the hefty space required to sustain such large creatures.

"We’re constantly learning that we’re protecting too small an area. We save 10,000 acres when we need a million," Medler said. "Migration patterns and species interactions show we need more area. It’s hard for tourists to see the difference, but it’s going to take huge areas to preserve the jaguar."

But while the Punta Leonas of Costa Rica flourish, its national parks are hampered by bureaucratic politics and lack of funding. National parks operate under tight government budget restrictions, so the parks only see a small percentage of the money they make.

"There are folks in the central government in San Jose whose power is connected to pots of money," Abel said. "There are these ‘black boxes’ in San Jose, where all the money goes and disappears."

Carara National Park, on the Pacific coast, has a fully remodeled visitor center that is empty because a concessions law that allowed parks to operate vendors (like gift and coffee shops) was derailed by politicians in the 1990s.

The Lonely Planet travel guide, used by thousands of students and low-budget travelers every year, dismisses Carara as a waste of time because it doesn’t offer the same trail guide teams and lodging amenities that privately-operated reserves have.

Louis Giovanny Soto, the park’s Chief Ranger, depends on foreign education programs, including Western’s RICA, to help maintain the park. Years of college students visiting from the United States have contributed to trail maintenance and infrastructure development, and many of the concrete bridges on the park’s trails are imprinted with student’s names and personal messages.

Soto, who has watched over Carara for more than 30 years, said the tourism boom is also changing Costa Rica’s culture, and places like Jaco are now nearly unrecognizable to him. He said the area has changed so much it doesn’t even feel like home.

"We’ll have nothing left of our own culture," Soto said.

Ever since it began in the 1980s and 1990s, ecotourism in Costa Rica has been a glass half-full, half-empty debate. It’s a compromise between environmental protection and the needs of a developing country’s economy. There are still true eco-lodges in Costa Rica, but they are few and far between.

Danta Corcovado Lodge is located on an 86-acre private nature reserve on the Osa Peninsula, five miles from Corcovado National Park and close to the Guaymi Indian Reserve.

Merlyn Oviedo, the lodge’s owner, said he is part of a group of entrepreneurs who believe in giving back to the communities they live in. The Western RICA program students, who stayed for week, were able to meet and play soccer with the locals. Part of the money paid for their stay was used to paint six houses in the village of Guadalupe, and by the end of the trip, dozens of bright, eclectic murals decorated the villager’s homes, with everything from hummingbirds and sunsets to pandas and Dalmatians.

Of an average all-inclusive packaged tour, 80 percent goes to hotels, airlines and other international companies, but more than 90 percent of the revenue from an eco-lodge goes back to the local community, according to the International Ecotourism Society.

To help travelers make more environmentally- and socially-conscious choices, the Costa Rica Tourism Board is developing a Certificate of Sustainable Tourism. It rates hotels and resorts on a scale of one to five, indicating their level of sustainability, much like a hotel star rating system.

Moreover, Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Aria Sanchez announced plans last year to make Costa Rica carbon neutral by 2021, according to a Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development press release.

Focusing on carbon neutrality may be an attempt to apply a veneer of eco-friendliness on a country struggling to keep its "green" reputation, Abel said.

"Costa Rica is touted as an environmentally-friendly place," he said, "but there’s no political will to support the parks."

But for a country trying to get to first-world status with limited means, the tourism industry is putting it light years ahead of other Central American countries, Medler said.

"Those folks [Costa Ricans] are damn excited about their environment," he said. "The upper middle class folks were as enthusiastic as the tourists. They’re more excited about seeing the coatimundi at Punta Leona than American tourists at Yellowstone National Park seeing the buffalos."

Celia Jackson studies environmental policy. This is her third published piece in The Planet.