In a featured double bill, Lydia Manch explores Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, starting at an eco-resort in the north of the country – where everything is abundant, but most of all the lizards…
It thunders my first week in Guanacaste, and everybody’s talking about it.
Peak tourism season in Costa Rica is November to April, the usual weather along this stretch of coastline pure heat and cloudless skies. But this spring’s brought more dramatic weather. Across the border with Nicaragua storms have been landing with devastating force, in northwest Costa Rica the impact’s milder: fierce heat laced through with sudden, tropical downpours that end as abruptly as they start.
Sometimes it’s sundrenched, sometimes just drenched; both improbably beautiful. The minutes and hours after the storms finish deliver the best soundtrack, the light drip from leaves onto corrugated metal roofs, the bellow of the howler monkeys living in the trees next to the apartment we’re renting in Potrero starting to move again, the occasional musical thud of mangoes landing on roofs and balconies, knocked down by the force of the rain. The evening skies are thunderous and fiery, unseasonable clouds painted orange and purple by the sunset.
The Guanacaste coast
One day we rent a boat and trace this stretch of coastline, a group of dolphins meeting us just after we leave the shore and racing alongside the catamaran’s flank, sleekly powerful and impossibly graceful. Another evening we eat on the clifftop terrace of Sentido Norte, with the boutique hotel setting and expensively delicate glassware backdropped by huge vultures circling the treetops below us, and constant lightning crackling over the sea. And at sunset, metres away from the small beachfront bars, huge storks with a strong pterodactyl energy divebomb the shallows and break back into the air with bicep-sized fish nonchalantly clamped in their beaks. No matter how manicured and luxurious the human interventions, the wildlife’s muscular, and fiercely beautiful, and ever-present.
There’s nowhere in the world I’ve been so aware of how quickly and entirely all signs of human life could be reabsorbed back by the vines and the trees and the sea; it’s very clear that if the iguanas and the storks ever form an alliance against us, the New Englanders and Quebecois flocking here in winter are going to need to give them back their beaches.
Flashback to February 2023 and I’m at Destinations, the London travel expo. A panel of industry experts are trend forecasting for the coming year, and among all the talk of winter sun and off-the-grid yoga retreats, two big themes in luxury travel keep coming up: the ever-swelling demand for eco-tourism with significant, established credentials, and the rise of luxe all-inclusives.
So Reserva Conchal feels topical. A 2300-acre eco-resort on the Guanacaste coastline, where Marriott have two of the hotels within the reserve – the Westin, which we’re visiting for the weekend, and The W Costa Rica – this ticks a lot of the trend forecaster boxes: all-inclusive – which Marriott Bonvoy’s increasingly expanding into in the Caribbean and Latin America – meets ecotourism, which Costa Rica’s been exploring hard since long before it was an industry buzzword.
Around 30% of the country’s land is protected in national parks and wildlife reserves, and estimates put the ecotourism sector at more than 3% of Costa Rica’s entire GDP. And Reserva Conchal, along with its embedded hotels, is a cluster of low-to-no waste programmes, wildlife conservation measures and energy initiatives: the resort powered entirely by renewable energy, home to the country’s first desalination plant; the golf course kept green with 90% reclaimed water and laced through with wildlife corridors for animals to cross it safely.
The Westin Reserva Conchal.
A US brand, the Westin has a lot of the things that come with that: enormous beds; bars showing golf and big NBA games scattered in the grounds in unexpected, palm-tree-hidden places; a luxury-equals-abundance approach that puts you never further than 4 minutes walk from a cocktail or a plate of nachos or a steady supply of both at a swim-up bar. Menus at the nine different restaurants within the Westin’s grounds vary in cuisine – steaks in the Costa Rican cattle-rancher tradition at La Sabana? Pan-Asian fusion at Bamboo? – but have an identical and very North American take on portion size.
But it also comes with a different, Costa Rica-specific kind of abundance, one where jewel-coloured hummingbirds skim over the pool, shifting past each other like an iridescent kaleidoscope. Huge lizards pad regally across the paved paths in front of us. Crested magpie-jays make graceful, determined assaults on the Faisanella terrace where we eat breakfast, coming for any unguarded plate of watermelon or gallo pinto.
The Westin Reserva Conchal.
No matter how decadent a path you take through the all-inclusive offering here – and there are some pretty decadent, very piña-colada-heavy paths available – the real luxury is the setting: the Westin is just a comfortable, welcoming access point to some of the most beautiful coastline I know of in the world. Between the huge lizards basking next to our sunloungers, the dolphins skirting near the edge of our boat, sliding in and out of the depths alongside us, the storks circling the sky above the beach at sunset – it all adds up to something wilder than I expected, even within the curated expanse of Reserva Conchal, and a lot more ruggedly beautiful. Sure, it’d take the natural world a little longer to reclaim the Westin’s sturdy blocks and clubrooms and well-tended golf course and incense-scented day spa than the tiny beach-village where we’ve been staying up till now. But still. Maybe not that much longer.
Back in our apartment in Potrero, the stormfront moves on, and the pieces of driftwood and trees the winds washed onto the beach get slowly collected and added to the evening bonfires. We lie by the pool under the mildly-perilous shade of the mango trees, go to yoga classes on a small treehouse platform where the instructions for your Yin Flow are punctuated by the roar of howler monkeys nearby, walk along the beach at night under a sky so bright with stars it looks like an optical illusion – grateful that all of it exists, for however long the lizards let us keep it.
The Westin Reserva Conchal, an All-Inclusive Golf Resort & Spa, Playa Conchal Guanacaste, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica. Club Guestrooms at the Westin Reserva Conchal start at $682 a night in spring. For more information, including details of rooms and suites, golf, activities and kids club, follow the link to the website: Westin Reserva Conchal.
There are flights to Liberia airport in Guanacaste from London, including with United Airlines, with stops in Canada, Spain, and the US. For more information about Costa Rica, and to start planning your trip, visit the official tourism website at www.visitcostarica.com.
Lydia’s Costa Rican adventure continues next weekend as she heads out to the Papagayo Peninsula for a dose of ‘pura vida’…
