Guanacaste in English: Dollars and Luxury Inundate Costa Rica’s Most Touristy Province

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Nosara, Guanacaste. The sun was setting like a huge golden disc over the Pacific Ocean, while behind it, in the hills of the Nicoya Peninsula, a festival of electric clouds lit up Guiones Beach with lightning during the most photographed moment of the day. The thunder at sunset mingled with the whooping of howler monkeys in the strip of protected forest next to the white sand, in the most touristy part of a town called Nosara, the coastal district of Costa Rica fetching the highest price per square meter of land.

“It's wild, impressive!” exclaimed Nicole, a Canadian teacher who arrived the day before as a tourist and was already thinking about the possibility of moving there seasonally with her family, attracted by the natural magic and the ease of getting by without having to speak Spanish, although she acknowledges that prices are very high. The warm orange light illuminated her face despite a light drizzle. All around, smiling families celebrated the achievements of their children learning to surf, their shouts muffled by the relaxing sound of a moderate swell of waves. The spectacle was also enjoyed by a group of local youths who perfumed the moment with a puff or two of marijuana. Next to them, five Nicaraguan workers were finishing off their day at the relentless construction sites —where they earn $4 an hour with no insurance— with beer, sunset, and jokes. 

Everyone fits in this snapshot on the beach at low tide, on the public sand, but inland, there is trouble in paradise.

The next day, a rainbow would add to the sunset show, and a small plane with new visitors would fly over the beach just before nightfall. A bleach-blonde woman in yoga pants would also dance in front of the setting sun, worshipping it as perhaps she imagined the pre-Columbian Indigenous people did, whose princess Nosara would give this town its name, the same town that in 1969 was promoted in The New York Times as a destination for U.S. expats with money and a desire for adventure.

At that time, Nosara was a place far from the world, occupied by cattle ranches and forest that can still be seen today in the undulating terrain, next to the coastline that gives it its rural and beach identity. The district, created in 1988, measures 132 square kilometers, a quarter of one percent of the country's territory, and belongs to the canton that gives its name to the Nicoya Peninsula, but the feeling of isolation prevails. To get to San José, some prefer to pay about $80 for a plane ride rather than spend six hours on a bus. It takes almost an hour and a half to get there from Nicoya on a semi-paved road that leads to the town and crosses it via a network of dirt roads. SUVs, ATVs, beach buggies, tuk-tuks, motorcycles, and brave cyclists come and go, amid advertisements for tourist properties and related businesses.

“There are no beaches more beautiful than the Pacific coast of Costa Rica,” said the advertisement promoting the “American project,” the ambitious 1,100-hectare real estate venture of an adventurer named Allan Hutchinson, a lawyer from Washington. He bought the land at a bargain price from a group of locals, including Guanacaste landowner Filemón Baltodano, who, according to legend, had become rich thanks to a pact with the devil and had condemned his descendants to poverty. Hutchinson’s megaproject did not materialize as he had planned, but the path had already been laid out.

“Have your own home here on the beaches of Nosara,” said that advertisement, as any ad could have said 40 years later, after a pandemic, at a time when this town ended up exploding with dollars and tourists, consolidating itself as “ground zero” of the trend that now floods the coastal areas of the province of Guanacaste. This is explained by Emanuel Gutiérrez, a young researcher and activist who, at the end of 2024, led the deployment of a census in Nosara with the support of the state entity specializing in national statistics. The result was a pessimistic picture of a bubble of exclusivity and exclusion that puts local residents in a difficult position.

Nosara is the district in Costa Rica where the price of some land has increased by more than 1,000 percent since the 2008 financial crisis. In 2023, the cost of living in Nosara was 50 percent higher than in the capital San José, the fourth most expensive city in Latin America, with prices double those in Managua for a liter of milk or a national beer. A tomato sells for $3 in a mini-supermarket and liquor store in the exclusive area of Playa Guiones, the same price as a kilo in the city’s markets. About 70 kilometers away is another tourist town called Tamarindo, which in 2024 was the most expensive destination in the world for British travelers, according to a report by a department of the U.K. Post Office.

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The economy, the natural landscape, and regional community life are undergoing rapid transformation due to foreign investment and the massive influx of tourists, new residents, or simply businesspeople to territories where the law of the market prevails. The state can do little or is unwilling to do much to regulate this growth, reduce the severe environmental impact, contain inequality, curb the cost of living, or ease the pressure on basic resources such as water. “It's a process that cannot be stopped. It's neither good nor bad, it just needs to be balanced. We cannot stop development in order to preserve the autonomy of places,” said Housing Minister Ángela Mata on the radio on July 25. Now the region is experiencing something akin to a new colonization, but with the fever of dollars and the consolation of jobs for locals, for workers who come from other parts of the country, and for Nicaraguan immigrants.

“You can't stop this growth. As long as planes fly, people will come,” reflects Rich Burnam, an American who owns the real estate company Surfing Nosara, whose signs abound in the town, in his office. He does not know how many sales he has made because he sometimes manages to sell the same property several times: he sells it to someone and then offers to sell it back at a higher price over time. In this place, it is possible to squeeze the land dry. He also complains about the high cost of living in the town due to the pressure of tourism, but continues to promote the lifestyle that combines beach, surfing, yoga, protected forests, and exclusivity. There is Indian and Italian food, Japanese ice cream and wellness centers, organic products, horse therapy, spiritual painting classes at sunset, and restaurants decorated with Hawaiian statues in this region, considered the cradle of Costa Rican folklore.

From the sofa where the American real estate agent talks about preserving the local culture, you can see white shops with English names on either side of a newly cobbled street. On the glass walls hangs an advertisement for a four-bathroom house for sale at $3 million and another for rent, with eight bathrooms, at $11,000 per week. Many other houses are rented on digital platforms that until recently operated tax-free. There is also an offer for a 1,100-square-meter lot for $1,850,000 on Guiones Beach. “A meter that cost $200 when I arrived now exceeds $2,000. It's a huge increase, but people go to attractive places and we're not going to stop it,” adds Burnam, who advocates for community integration, even though 16 years after his arrival he is still unable to speak Spanish. He also surfs in nearby towns where the wave of foreigners is growing.

Burnam is one of the 270 current members of a local private organization called the Nosara Civic Association (NCA), formed in 1975 by foreigners who settled here. They call it “en ci ei” and critical Nosarans refer to its members as “los gringos” or “los ricos” (the rich). It is a kind of parallel local government that built the first aqueduct, brought electricity, managed the construction of roads, and is responsible for preserving the forested areas that are part of the tourist magnet. It even had a private police force until a member pointed out that this was excessive. Now it also has private firefighters and maintains its usual lobbying of state authorities, those in San José when appropriate, or the Municipality of Nicoya. The NCA even advises the mayor's office on new building regulations that are met with skepticism by local leaders. “They take advantage of the state's neglect to do what they want under the pretext of development,” says Marco Ávila, president of a community association, former councilman in the Nicoya city council, and owner of a nursery that also benefits from the tourism industry.

“We have had to replace the government in some ways, and that's terrible, but it's survival, it's necessary,” argues Marco Villegas, executive director of the NCA. He is a young man from the central region of the country who got to know Nosara as a child on family trips and now works toward being a bridge between the ambitions or skepticism of both sides, he explains, sitting in a restaurant opposite the small airport. He is not related to his namesake Ávila or to Emanuel Gutiérrez, but he agrees in pointing to Tulum, the former paradise of alternative tourism in the Mexican Caribbean, as the story that Nosara should not repeat, although “some reflections are disturbingly similar,” he wrote in June. The spokesperson for the organization representing wealthy foreigners also points the finger at unbridled tourism, uncontrolled luxury, and the “romanticization” of nature, as well as drug money laundering, unbearable prices, and community dispossession.

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“It was foolish of my grandfather to trade that land, but I think he was forced to do so,” says Shirley Barboza, 43, granddaughter of Enrique Ruiz, a Nosara native with marked Indigenous features who died in July after several years of living in poverty, depending on a pension that lasted only half the month, after having squandered millions and distributed his assets among his descendants. Barboza lives on her inherited plot on the outskirts of the tourist center. It is a small, dark, wooden house with no running water. She sells handicrafts to tourists, and her husband earns a living transporting people in one of the tuk-tuks that are part of the local landscape. They also live off tourism, but she admits to feeling that they only receive the crumbs of the industry. “It's good because the economy is growing, but this is the law of the jungle. Look at the dirt and stone streets. I had to spend more than a million pesos ($2,000) to dig a well because we don't have water. It's hard.” She, however, does not fall into the technical poverty range that affects at least 25 percent of Nosara's inhabitants, while wealth multiplies and is flaunted all around. “My son says we should tear down this house and build apartments to put on Airbnb.”

Her son, who managed to become a professional, lives in Spain, and they are considering joining him. They talk about preparing for a perhaps near future in this beachless neighborhood called San Ramón, with its bad streets, simple houses, and wooded land with a few cattle. There are no new buildings, but there are numerous signs advertising properties for sale. It is very likely that what already happened in the area where Grandfather Enrique's farm was located will soon happen again, says the artisan. “Displacement,” as recognized by the NCA; “neocolonialism,” as it is called in academia; “touristification,” in the words of some research centers; or “extractivism,” as Gutiérrez categorizes it. It is also called “gentrification,” a concept that is increasingly appearing in the national press and in public opinion. Now two-thirds of Costa Ricans perceive that the arrival of foreigners is driving up land prices and the cost of living, and 84 percent see the need for a law to control the sale of land with high scenic value, according to a recent survey by the National University.

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Neither Nosara nor Guanacaste are the first to receive a massive influx of foreigners, but here it seems that the post-pandemic explosion has accelerated and intensified what had been happening for years. All coastal areas and certain regions of the Central Valley are facing pressure from the arrival of foreign capital attracted by profitability, stability, and “pura vida” near forests, a formula that the country has been promoting since the 1990s with the development of tourism, an activity that represents more than 8 percent of GDP and accounts for 25 percent of jobs, including indirect ones, according to the government. The real estate side of tourism is evident to varying degrees and with varying impacts along almost the entire Pacific coast, in the south of the Caribbean coast, and also in rural inland areas.

Real estate agencies even provide transportation in their cities for potential investors or clients to come and see the area, and construction workers are brought in by contractors in groups from Nicaragua, although others come on their own. “A friend came with a group and told me to come too. It's good because I don't pay rent, water or electricity,” says Antonio Martínez, as he rests in a hammock in front of the tin-walled room where he lives crammed in with his co-workers, in front of the three-story house where he works without legal documents. He has never seen the owners; he only knows the manager of the construction company, which is owned by some people from San José, he says. Next to him, on a wooden bench, another worker, Ramón Calero, eats his Sunday lunch: rice and beans in a plastic cup. “It's good to work here,” he repeats, convinced or convincing himself.

The people of Nosara, although they benefit from the industry, do not express as much satisfaction, notes Emanuel Gutiérrez in a café in the Arenales neighborhood, known as “the Ticos' neighborhood,” where a basic lunch and an additional dessert cost 10,000 colones ($20). He spends four hours explaining how Nosara has become the epicenter of transformation in Guanacaste and how it is forced to look in the mirror of Tulum.

“It's been like an economic explosion that the locals couldn't get in on, or at least not like others. Here, someone who earns $1,000 a month has a hard time.” That's what it can cost per month to rent a medium-sized house in Arenales (or two nights in one of the mansions with a panoramic view of the sea). That's why it's difficult for teachers to come to public schools: living here is impossible for them, and they are forced to take the bus at 4:30 a.m. from the city of Nicoya, as documented by La Voz de Guanacaste in numerous publications. That's why public education is deficient and why the average level of schooling in Nosara barely reaches the second year of secondary school, including the foreign population.

It is not uncommon for two or more families to share the same house to lower costs, while in the same district there are many unoccupied mansions waiting for their owners to come on vacation or for guests who can afford to pay $10,000 or more to rent for a week. The permanent population has grown 80 percent in Nosara in 15 years, to 8,700 people, but those who live here seasonally number 26,600, not counting classic hotel tourists, according to the census with which Gutiérrez captured the current “snapshot” of Nosara.

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The changes in the community are many and rapid, if the word can be used for a town where gates and walls with surveillance cameras abound. Divisions mark life and also death: There is a communal cemetery and another informal one where mostly foreigners are buried, located in a state-owned conservation area facing the beach. In market terms, its value is immense, although there are no prices because this land is public and cannot be bought or sold at this time.

The homicide rate in Nosara in 2024 was 12.6 per 10,000 inhabitants, seven times higher than the national average, although no investors or tourists were among the victims. Drug traffickers also fight here with guns for market share, to supply soft and hard drugs to activities inside the walls. “The day they kill a gringo is the end of Nosara,” people often say, according to Gutiérrez. Homicides were the leading cause of death for the year, followed by motorcycle accidents, the preferred vehicle for traversing the district's rough roads, where wearing a helmet seems to be prohibited, but police enforcement is almost nonexistent. “Understand, it's the law of the jungle, every man for himself,” says a woman at the gas station that marks the boundary between the working-class and tourist areas, near a large, dry guanacaste tree that, thanks to community activism, was saved from being cut down next to the Nosara River. It is a natural monument, a symbol: Its trunk stands tall with advertisements for construction materials. Next to it, there are also advertisements for a real estate business, a course on carrying weapons, and a well-drilling company, a very profitable business in the area.

Since the pandemic, 443 swimming pools and only 42 social housing units have been built, a ratio of ten to one, according to data from the Federated College of Engineers and Architects (CFIA). Throughout the province of Guanacaste, the driest in the country, 3,500 swimming pools have been built since the pandemic, with an average size of 38 square meters each, almost the same as a government-built home for a poor family.

There are no hotel chains in Nosara, but there are in other nearby towns. The news of the year in the tourism sector was the opening of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in a bay 80 kilometers from Nosara, where a night can cost up to $12,000. It is the same chain as the legendary New York hotel where John F. Kennedy used to celebrate his birthday. On one side is a Four Seasons and on the other a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, in a 1,600-hectare tourist enclave called Papagayo, promoted by the government with a special law since the 1980s to attract these investments. Guanacaste is now the driving force behind the tourism industry, which in 2024 broke the record for foreign currency injection into the national economy, one of the factors behind the high prices in the country.

In the region, meanwhile, one in four inhabitants lives below the technical poverty line and thousands more are struggling with the high cost of living in certain areas due to the effect of tourists and these foreign investments. Unemployment is higher than the national average, and one in seven people are looking for work, according to official figures.

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The idea of the absence of the state is not entirely true. It does get involved, but corruption is well known in local governments (“we paid the official to give us advice that was actually to approve the permit,” says an architect dedicated to tourism projects). The central government's approach is to promote the tourism industry, not necessarily to regulate it. There is a persistent state policy of exploiting its environmental brand and the “pura vida” beach lifestyle to attract foreigners of different profiles. The latest special law was passed in 2021 to attract “digital nomads,” foreigners with salaries above $3,000 per month (double the average in Costa Rica that year), to settle in the country with exemptions from income tax, remittances, and equipment imports. A red carpet for the economy to make the supposed spillover. Under the current government, the Tourism Institute has made public its strategy to attract high-profile tourists with incomes of at least $100,000 per year. Hence the excitement when, in January 2025, basketball star Michael Jordan landed in his luxurious private jet at the province's international airport. There was also excitement when Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the tycoon who presides over the country where 61 percent of tourists come from, visited. She posted photos on social media of herself surfing at a beach called Santa Teresa, at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, where restaurants do not accept payments in colones and where some of the younger locals do not speak Spanish.

“This development, as they call it, is actually like a dissonant steamroller that homogenizes the territory and only preserves what can be useful for that model, as is the case with some forests,” explains Esteban Barboza, a researcher at the National University who heads the Observatory of Tourism, Migration, and Sustainable Development of the Chorotega Region (OTMS) there. On his computer, he shows numerous photographs that support his work. For example, Las Catalinas, a private “resort town” of almost 90 hectares, Mediterranean in style, founded by an Atlanta businessman and located two hours from Nosara. “It started with a vision: a new vision of ‘the good life’. This life is one of responsibility and ecological sustainability, social cohesion and personal connection,” the project's website dares say, also quoting, of course, a review from The New York Times: “Residents and visitors live steps away from oceanfront restaurants, a store with everything you need for outdoor adventures, a gourmet market with a wine cellar, a spa, and clothing and furniture stores.”

International rankings support this trend. A report called the Millionaire Migration Report says that by 2025, Costa Rica will be the new magnet for millionaires in Latin America due to its image of political and legal stability, as well as its open environment for free investment and relatively high quality of life, the second best in Latin America, according to the Numbeo platform. It is also one of the best countries for retirees, according to Forbes. In 2024, 1.9 million passengers landed at Guanacaste’s airport, in the center of the region where some 400,000 people live.

“You feel like they're crushing us and that they only value local people when it means making more money, but not out of respect for the Indigenous population. If they could, they would buy us out,” says Heidy Villegas, 56, an empirical cook, who is an example of the danger of displacement. Her father left her the plot of land he had owned since the 1950s in an area that was later declared a state nature reserve on Pelada Beach in Nosara under pressure from the NCA, in its attempt to protect the town's wooded environment, which attracts so many visitors and generates so much income. She has lived there with her family for 20 years, as the owner recognized by state institutions, but a legal process threatens to force demolition, she says, papers in hand. She is one of 17 families accused by the state of alleged trespassing and illegal construction on that strip of beachfront.

She recounts this with anger because she claims that there are other buildings owned by foreigners that are allowed to remain in that area, including hotels and the mansion where she cooks when the family that owns it comes to visit. “I open the front gate there and I'm right on the beach. They can stay and they're taking us away. Why? Because our houses aren't luxurious and they spoil the landscape? Because they want to have this strip as their garden to add value to their businesses? Because they want to divide it up among themselves later? The unequal treatment is disgusting.”

She insists that she is not anti-tourism, that she does not feel envy, and that her family lives off these investments, but she perceives a gross imbalance. “They see us as squatters in our own country. They act like looters. It can't be that money moves everything,” she says, clenching her fist inside her house, surrounded by a high gate topped by several security cameras that captured the moment on August 7 when a group of police and government officials arrived to notify her of the eviction. Now she is hoping for one last chance to appeal the ruling, but she regrets that her neighbors Pablo and María can barely read and have more difficulty defending themselves or obtaining legal representation.

Nadia Alfaro, 51, faces a similar situation. She is the receptionist at a small hotel for foreigners in the exclusive Guiones beach area. She shows the land that she and her partner have owned for years and which she now sees in danger. She knows about environmental laws and government procedures, but fears that nothing will prevent the displacement and that the area will become a kind of theme park. Her message seems clear: “It's like a grand master plan: to eliminate the local people under the pretext of preserving nature and hand things over to the millionaires. They are only interested in people for labor, because they generate wages, but they don't care how they live. That kind of tourism leaves money that doesn't stay here, and those who decide to stay make a life for themselves, occupying more and more space.”

From the property, you could see tourists taking surfing lessons and, behind them, the wall of a house that cut off a communal road on the grounds that it was private property. They reported it to the municipality, but nothing ever happened. “They always win,” she exclaims hopelessly, before leaving for the hotel in the car that a foreign family lends her during their stays in the country.

The road from Pelada Beach to the main street is a showcase of new houses and beautiful lots, offers of maintenance services for unoccupied mansions, and real estate agencies, including that of Rich Burnam, the businessman who calls for integration with the community to prevent tensions from escalating further. A neighbor searches Google Earth for some of his properties to check that they are within the refuge, without being persecuted like Heidy, Nadia, and other neighbors who are looking for ways to preserve their way of life. They want to preserve their homes or land, although they suspect that it is already too late and that, as Burnam said, possible solutions will have to come from the same place where the problems originate: the market itself or the relationship between groups with unequal power.

In August, the Constitutional Court ordered the Nicoya mayor's office to begin the recovery of 80 hectares under NCA control for public use and to halt any work on green spaces, streets, or communal areas that were part of the “American project,” a decades-long claim. The ruling is seen as a triumph in the defense of communal property that sets a precedent for other coastal communities. The NCA responded that this decision jeopardizes the conservation of the forests in the Nosara Forest Reserve because, it warns, it opens the door to the “private interests” of others. Months of conflict lie ahead.

Álvaro Murillo is a Costa Rican journalist, vice president of the Central American Network of Journalists, editor at Semanario Universidad, and contributor to international media outlets.