The Eco-Community Craze in Costa Rica

We’ve been hearing a lot about eco-communities in Costa Rica. We decided to see what all the hype is about, so we recently booked a few nights at one. The name will need to be anonymized but let’s call it The Courage of Gaia. This is my review.

You’re tired of the rat race. Corporate life, commuting, spending half your tech salary on city rent. Instead, you have a vision. To build a community nestled in the jungle of Costa Rica and live there in harmony with nature. To sit at a long communal dinner table, lovingly crafted by local artisans, and eat nourishing food harvested that day from your bountiful permaculture gardens. To host transformational retreats and help usher in the transition to a world of healing, balance, and abundance for all.

Look, I get it. Every accommodation’s website is there to showcase the place at its best. We had booked a so-called Earth Tambo room. The website says “The Earth walls and floors give the space a very grounding feeling and inspire a deep stillness.”

What they failed to mention was that the walls only go half way up to the ceiling, so when you’re in your room you’re also outside in the jungle. I don’t know about you, but my idea of “exploring new and ancient ways of living”, as the website implores us, doesn’t involve a room where a procession of ants ranging from tiny to thumbnail-sized are constantly marching by, nor where nighttime visitors include a cricket the size of a post-it note. I was hoping that feeling of deep stillness would appear right after we coaxed the prehistoric creature out of the area with one of the provided umbrellas, but somehow all I felt was gratitude that normally we stay in places with walls.

The food was vegetarian with occasional leanings towards vegan (the only milk was coconut milk). For a couple of days we thought it must be gluten-free too because the bread had a weird texture, but we asked about that and were told it was home-made. Er, last time I checked, home-made bread didn’t have to have the texture of cardboard, but I guess ushering in a new paradigm for living involves challenging some long-held limiting beliefs. Also, I’m pretty sure transporting apples from the United States isn’t exactly a perfect example of “aligning ourselves to the wisdom and power of Nature.”

We met some members of the community. Here, the contrast between The Courage of Gaia and hotels we have stayed in became most apparent. The Costa Ricans who run those hotels aren’t just in the business of hospitality - it is their passion. They welcome us, they chat with us, they ask us how they can help us. They live in little rooms above hotel restaurants. At The Courage of Gaia, most of the community no longer live on site (apparently it got too intense), so it was the first place where we didn’t really meet the owners. Nobody seemed to care how we were doing or made literally any attempt to have a conversation with us. Ironically, this place which claims to be least commercial and most community-oriented ended up being the one where we felt least welcome. And despite the supposedly peacey-lovey vibes, it somehow turned out to be one of the most expensive too.

Look, nobody said “activating our roots as children of Gaia” would come cheap.