STRESSED-OUT TRANSPLANTS ARE FINDING REFUGE IN THIS COSTA RICA GETAWAY

When he needs respite from the dreary winters of Portland, Ore., David Howitt roams the planet in search of two kinds of places: the crisp air of mountain towns in states like Colorado and balmy beach spots with gentle enough waves that the 55-year-old author, entrepreneur, and business consultant can surf them. So when he stumbled upon the Costa Rican beach town of Nosara five years ago, Howitt knew he’d found a place he wanted to spend much more time.

“Yeah, this is it. This is home,” says Howitt, who sold his tea company, Oregon Chai, for US$75 million in 2004. Nosara felt undiscovered, inasmuch as anywhere is these days.

“There are Costa Rica and local laws around keeping development here minimal, there’s a yoga community, and while there are dirt roads, you can also find a little grocery store that sells organic food or a killer little restaurant with an amazing wine list. For me, it scratched all the itches,” he says.

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Where other beach towns like Mexico’s Sayulita and Tulum have gotten too crowded or polluted, Nosara feels different to Howitt—a sentiment others apparently share. Costa Rica is calling to business leaders who are weary of stressful cultures in the U.S. and increasingly enabled to escape them. The country offers just the right mashup of pleasant weather, wellness, and adventure to lure a trove of affluent transplants to the tropics.

“You can get in a couple surf sessions then jump on a mountain bike, or go fishing and catch a bunch of mahi mahi, or any number of spots in town to get a ceviche and beer, or a vinyasa class in the jungle,” Howitt says.

Howitt, who’s built a business consultancy at the Portland-based Meriwether Group, waited for his children to get to college and his company to a place where it could be managed remotely, and he’s now building a house in Nosara that will be ready later this year.

“I lost my best friend a year and a half ago to cancer,” he says. “He was a healthy, vibrant, great dad, and I was with him when he passed. It’s cliche, but we never know when our last day is going to be and that drove it home for me. I became much more intentional about wanting to start to live the next chapter of my life.”

Costa Rica’s wellness offerings lure travelers from all over the world—and then inspires them to stick around. Around every corner, there is a jerseyed road biker pumping up an impossibly steep mountain road no matter the searing heat and humidity, as well as signs for smoothies and yoga studios, crystal healings and sound baths, and organic and vegan food purveyors. While in some vacation destinations wellness can feel obligatory, this country has it dialed, and is pouring investment into outdoor recreation, yoga teacher training, and surf resorts.

You won’t be in the country for longer than a few minutes without hearing its trademark idiom, “Pura Vida,” an expression most don’t know the origin of (it’s from a 1950s Mexican movie) but everyone innately understands as the country’s version on “aloha,” or maybe “hakuna matata.” It encapsulates the country’s peaceful history, at least the history that begins after an internal civil conflict led to the disbanding of the country’s military, in 1949. Since, Costa Rica has relied on its U.N. membership to keep it out of some of the conflicts that have kept some surrounding countries in strangleholds of violence, and its towering, verdant mountains to keep natural disasters like hurricanes at bay. Those peaceful 75 years meant space to develop a robust tourism brand, a product that is relatively expensive but that is rich in both sustainability and authentic, mature wellness offerings.

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Griet Depypere had built a successful gelato business in one of the world’s other “Blue Zones”—places where people are said to frequently live past 100 years old—in Sardinia, Italy. The Belgian knew nothing about gelato when she and her sister opened the shop in a 2-acre garden, but they ultimately built 1,200 seats on the premises and wound up serving 1,000 liters of gelato and 3,000 people daily, hosting live music and other events. So when Depypere moved to Costa Rica to open the Cala Luna hotel in Tamarindo and then bought a 74-acre property nearby, she felt called to bring people together. Twice weekly, La Senda offers farm-to-table dinners to as many as 36 people, alongside cacao ceremonies, sweat lodges and sound journeys on the rest of the property.

“The government was really promoting foreign investment in tourism,” Depypere says. “You didn’t have to have a local partner, and there were incentives: We didn’t have to pay any sales tax when building the hotel, and we could import whatever we needed to build it without paying import taxes.”

Evidence of the region’s growing appeal to wealthy transplants—who often start as tourists—is all around.

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The Four Seasons Peninsula Papagayo recently built a wellness shala out of bamboo, wood, concrete and mud at the top of a property that straddles two beaches on each side of the Papagayo Peninsula, and an on-staff yoga teacher does classes, cacao ceremonies, and crystal healings there multiple times per week.

For the especially well-heeled traveler, Guanacaste’s newest luxury offering is Villa Avellana, also on the Papagayo Peninsula but only open to full buyouts of the property. For somewhere between US$20,000 and US$40,000 a night (low versus high season), up to 23 guests can buy out a 10-bedroom, US$12 million house that comes with its own yacht and that fronts what feels like a private beach (all of Costa Rica’s beaches are public); a full staff that includes massage practitioners and sound healers, paddleboards and surfboards that can be checked out anytime, along with hiking and biking trails on the property. When a recent guest asked that a cold plunge tub be installed on the property, Villa Avellana promptly obliged.

In the renowned cloud forests in and around Monteverde, a community of wellness and adventure lovers was founded by Quakers fleeing the Korean War draft in the 1950s. Today, smart hoteliers offer guests the chance to pack their days with healthy choices. At the 26-room, carbon-neutral Hotel Belmar, a single day might include morning breathwork, then high-level vinyasa yoga, a walking farm tour of the Finca Madre Tierra.

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Then there’s Las Catalinas, the mostly car-free, European-style “town” developed on 1,000 acres of tropical dry forest in 2006 by MindSpring Enterprises founder Charles Brewer, now at 180 homes en route to a full buildout of 1,000 homes.

Visitors and residents alike have a whole suite of healthy lifestyle options here, beginning with the requirement that they walk from villa to smoothie shop, not drive. Next to the indoor/outdoor gym is a fully-stocked and independently owned gear shop, where anyone can rent mountain bikes, kayaks, surfboards and snorkel gear and head out to explore either Danta Bay on the water or the 26 miles of hand-built mountain bike and hiking trails that begin a short walk or ride from the shop.

Those trails loop up and around the property, revealing stunning ocean views. Back in “town,” some of the country’s best wellness offerings can be had at Las Catalinas’ Center of Joy, which serves up a robust menu of sound healing, kundalini, yoga, cold plunges and red light therapy. If you don’t feel different when you leave, staff members are known to say, then they’ve done something wrong.

2024-05-03T21:21:06Z dg43tfdfdgfd