Quien is mas treehouse? Life in the Costa Rican trees

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit, ‘Quien es mas macho?’ The contestants included Jack Lord from Hawaii-5-0 and Ricardo Montalban, who consistently came out on top.

Here we have a variation on that theme, with all the Costa Rican treehouses I’ve visited vying for the honor of being treehouser than thou.

One thing Ive noticed in my treehouse travels is that everyone has a different idea of what a treehouse should be.  Even the highest-ranking contestants–Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community on the Southern Pacific coast, and Michael Cranford’s multi-level masterpiece on the Osa Peninsula–have philosophical differences about what constitutes a treehouse.

Cranford didn’t want to drill into the enormous Guanacaste tree that is now his home, so has his treetop home supported with wooden supports that go from the ground to the platforms that make up their home. Erica and Matt of Finca Bella Vista didn’t want support from ground so brought in experts from the States to rig their treehouses without support from below.

Here’s a sampler of the treehouses I’ve seen on this trip, starting with the whimsical and working towards the amazing feats of engineering and imagination.

1. The Treehouse Hotel in Arenal is fun but they’re not strictly treehouses—they’re cute little houselets up on stilts.

2. In Uvita, Tra McPeak from Memphis runs the Tucan Hotel, 100 meters east of the Costanera (the coast highway), a hostel with a restaurant, a pen full of rabbits, and high-speed wireless internet. They have a small wooden treehouse out front you can rent for $6/per person. The price includes hammocks but it’s extra for mattresses and bedding. Tra, who arrived in Costa Rica in 2006, says he built the treehouse for his kids but all the backpackers coming through wanted to sleep up there, so he now makes it available to guests.

Casa Arbol treehouse, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

3. Humbert deSilva from France and Lisa Brouillard from Quebec have been in Costa Rica for almost 20 years. They run a small bed and breakfast, Casa Arbol, not far from Chacarita, where you turnoff to go to the Osa Peninsula. Their entire house is a work of art—Hugh makes the cupboards and the bed stands and the baths that look like something out of ancient Rome, not to mention the small treehouse that guests can stay in if they like. He never knows how a project will turn out when he begins it. He kept showing me carvings and rooms and tilework and saying, ‘When I finished, I saw that it was a”….swan, or frog, or a meditation on humanity.

4. Finca Bella Vista : a treehouse community in the jungle

Eric and Matt Hogan of Finca Bella Vista

A few short years ago Erica and Matt Hogan were camped in the mud by the Bella Vista River, up a rocky road to a spread of gorgeous but undeveloped land in Costa Rica’s Zona Sur. They weren’t sure what exactly was going to get them out of the mud, but dreamed of building a kind of Ewok village where they’d live in the trees and get to their neighbors’ houses via zipline.

Most people would have let that rather whimsical dream sputter and die, but Erica and Matt nailed it down and created Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community with 82 lots available for people who want to live off the grid and in the trees. They’ve strung 18 ziplines, which they use fir both transportation and fun, but eventually there will be 45.

Treehouse at Finca Bella Vista, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

We stayed in the first treehouse they built, and once I was 50 feet up in a structure cradled by three trees, listening to the roar of a nearby waterfall (visible from the top floor), I sighed and thought, This is it. This is the real thing.

5. At home in the trees: Michael Cranford’s treehouse on the Osa Peninsula

Michael Cranford and Rebecca Amelia were drinking margaritas in Boquete, Panama, talking about how as kids they’d retreat to the trees when they needed to get away. A few hours and numerous drinks later, they were sketching designs for a treehouse on napkins.

Michael Cranford's treehouse in Costa Rica; photo by Michael Cranford

Years later, the scrawled blueprints became reality when they hauled a few platforms built on the ground up into an enormous Guanacaste tree on their land on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

That was about a year ago, and Michael and Rebecca now live full-time in the trees, with Siete, a miniature husky, and Reina, an aging brindle boxer.

Breakfast nook in the treehouse;l photo by Michael Cranford

The treehouse is a true home, with a spacious, fully-equipped kitchen, guest bedrooms, an office for each of them, and a master  bedroom. Eighty percent of the wood used for the treehouse is downed hardwood from the jungle that is their backyard. They have internet and cable, flush toilets, and plenty of hot water in the shower.

They’ve seen a sloth right outside the kitchen, 3 kinds of monkeys—howlers, white face, and squirrel—come through regularly, and scarlet macaws hang out in the nearby branches.

They rent the place out occasionally—check their web site.

“I learned more about myself working with this tree,” says Michael, “than I have through any other life experience.”

Michael is a painter as well as an architect and visionary. “I moved down [to Costa Rica in 1998] to become an artist,” he says. He sold his painting contracting business in Colorado Springs, and gave himself “a window of 3-4 years to paint.” He painted 6 days a week.

That’s his goal this year, too—to do nothing but paint.  He created the painting below before he created his actual treehouse.

‘Avatar’ creators fund reforestation project in Costa Rica

Image from the movie "Avatar"

Giant Studios, creators of Avatar (a film released on December 18th), have come forward with the final infusion of funds needed for a reforestation project in Costa Rica

Avatar, directed by James Cameron, stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang.  Set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional inhabited Earth-like moon, the film portrays the mining of Pandora’s precious minerals. A race of humanoids indigenous to the moon, based in a settlement called Hometree, resist the human mining project, which threatens the Pandoran ecosystem.

More trees mean more monkeys; photo of baby howler monkey by Dan Wilson, co-founder of La Reserva in Costa Rica

It seems fitting that the creators of a film that explores the exploitation of ecosystems would fund “Connecting Forest Islands in Costa Rica,” a project of the Lake Arenal-area La Reserva Forest Foundation.

Giant Studies named their donation “Project Hometree.”

Turtle trouble in Costa Rica

A leatherback turtle; photo: scienceblogs.com

There was a great article in the New York Times in November about the plight of sea turtles in Costa Rica, home to some of their favorite nesting beaches.

I was recently in Tamarindo, a town just south of Playa Grande and its Las Baulas National Park (a baul is a leatherback turtle, which can be the size of a compact car).

In years past hundreds of leatherbacks came to lay their eggs in the sands of Playa Grande. The Times article says that just 32 leatherbacks were seen on the beach last year. And this year, locals told me, only a handful of turtles have been seen. The park’s ranger station had been shut down and, according to Alvaro Fonseco (quoted in the Times), Playa Grande is no longer being promoted as a place for tourists to see leatherbacks.

Five or six years ago I was part of a midnight turtle tour at Playa Grande, where a ranger led a small group of us, lighting our way with a masked flashlight (light disorients the turtles) to where a few leatherbacks were digging holes in the sand and dropping in their large, white flexible-skinned eggs. At that time, there were almost always a few turtles laying eggs each night. Now there have been only a few spotted this entire season.

Playa Grande and Las Baulas is close to Tamarindo, a burgeoning town where massive condo developments sit cheek by jowl with funky surfer hangouts. There’s been a recent moratorium on certain kinds of highrise building, but some projects seem exempt from the new rules, and enough got in under the wire that development is now encroaching on turtle territory.

And even the national park, already encroached upon, is under further threat. President Oscar Arias has floated a proposal that would protect the first 55 yards from the high tide mark but allow limited development on the next 80 yards. Critics say this would have the effect of making the area not so much a national park as just another zone for development, albeit with stricter rules for where lights can shine.

Expat Stephen Duplantier, a resident of San Ramon, and Alvaro Ugalde, former environment minister of Costa Rica, have put together an excellent online book about the current leatherback turtle situation in Costa Rica.

Many things threaten sea turtle survival, including development and its attendant lights, which can disorient the creatures and cause them to either not come to the beach to lay their eggs or to return to the water without having laid them. Drift net fishing (where there’s a lot of bycatch, or unintended catch, including turtles) is another culprit, as is climate change. Turtles can die in the hotter, more acidic seas caused by global warming, eggs on beaches are washed away by higher tides from more violent storms before they can hatch, and warmer sand can cause more females than males to be born, upsetting the gender balance of the turtle population.

When turtles lay eggs, the gender is not yet determined. Warmer temperatures produce more female eggs.

Playa Junqillal, where olive ridley turtles nest

South of Tamarindo is nearly-deserted Playa Junquillal, a favored nesting spot for Olive Ridley turtles. Even there, turtles are in trouble. Markers placed at the high tide mark are now often completely underwater, verifying that the seas, at least here, are indeed rising. Turtle eggs get washed away, eaten by predators, heated up to femalehood, or literally boiled by hot sands. A local crew of young people are paid $2/hour to collect the eggs and keep them safe in a hatchery kept at 85 degrees farenheit, which yields both male and female hatchlings.

Mobbed by grasshoppers in a Guanacaste treehouse

There's no escaping the bugs in a house with no walls; photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Imagine a house up in the trees, open to the elements, with a view of a pristine stretch of Costa Rican beach. It’s Paul and Jeanne Pidcock’s house , on the Pura Jungla eco-reserve, where Ray Beise took a dried-up cow pasture and lovingly reforested it into something lush and beautiful. He sells lots to like-minded people who agree to abide by the eco-friendly rules of the realm.

Sound good? Well, yes and no. In theory, the idea of no walls (and of course, no windows, and no screens) sounds pretty cool. You are one with the toucans and the monkeys.

And, it turns out, an army of insects.

Things got ugly at dusk. It wasn’t so bad if you sat in the dark and listened to the wind. But if you turned on a light—to cook, to read, or to write, you were mobbed by flying insects, from no-see-ums to oh-my-god-did-you-see- that?

Where in Costa Rica might there be screened windows? Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Leaf-green grasshoppers as long as my finger seemed especially friendly. They alighted on my book page, on my computer screen, and on the map I was studying to figure out the fastest road out of here. One crawled inside the bedside lamp I’d brought to the kitchen table (the lighting was dismal, probably because lights only attract bugs). The lamp was sideways so I couldn’t see the hopper’s body, but its long front feelers undulated out of the fixture as if the light itself had become insect-like.

When I conceded defeat and got up from my chair, I saw that I had sat on one of the poor little buggers.

Boom time greed and condo ghost towns in Playas del Coco

Rick Vogel, the genial host at Rancho Armadillo in Playas del Coco, is a good natured guy. But he pulls no punches when describing what’s going on in his adopted town and country.

“Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered,” he says, speaking of boom time greed in Coco.

Boom time became bust time a few years ago. Bruce Hammond of Better Homes Realty in Playas del Coco said that as far as he could see, the downturn here started in July of 2008 but by October of that year it was like “someone hit the ‘off’ switch.” Almost $3 billion of planned development was put on hold.

But back in the days of sky’s-the-limit condo flipping there were realtors, says Rick, who pulled some pretty hoggish stunts. Like selling a piece of property they knew didn’t have access to water and never would, not once but multiple times, as each new buyer discovered that he could build his dream home but his dream faucets would always be dry.

“We’re in a desert here,” said Rick. “The problem is water.” I’ve been hearing that sentiment everywhere I go in Costa Rica, from the ‘cielo roto’ (broken sky) valleys where it rains almost all the time, to the dry Guanacaste coast, even hotter and drier since swaths of the coastal dry forests have been cut down.

Another trick he saw was that a realtor would sell a local property for, say, $200,000, get a $50,000 deposit, use that $50,000 to buy the property from the Tico owners, then pocket the remaining $150,000.

These are not local Tico realtors, but foreigners with the imprimatur of multinational realty companies on their business cards. (I learned that you pay maybe $25,000 for a franchise and that you get pretty much nothing but the name).

Many condo projects in Costa Rica ground to a halt when the world economy took a nosedive

Playas del Coco has dozens of condo projects that started up years ago and now languish half-completed, rebar ladders rusting and cement foundations crumbling before they’re even built on. One huge construction crane visible in a development up the hill hasn’t moved, say the locals, for at least a year.

Many condos were sold in pre-construction, and some of those condos still haven’t been built. I met an African-American man from Louisiana (I comment on his race because most U.S. expats I meet are white) in line at the ATM.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“For better or worse,” he said, “I guess I do. Or I’m trying.”

He’d bought a pre-construction condo from Mapache and, four years later, it still wasn’t built. I don’t think Mapache is the only developer not delivering. The building of these mammoth complexes goes in phases, with continued construction funded by condo sales. When the world economic downturn put a huge dent in sales, much construction ground to a halt.

We talked to a Tica who ran a bar in Paraiso (near Playa Negra) who said many of the locals are out of work because all the developments that were employing them as builders or watchmen or cooks for the workers are ‘parado’ – stopped.

Like they say, when the United States sneezes, Costa Rica gets pneumonia.

If you want to look for a silver lining, it might be that in this climate it’s a buyer’s market. But as always, buyer beware.

Photos by David Webster Smith

A women’s orchid-growing cooperative in the Guanacaste hill country

Margarita Ponce Ortiz, member of the women's orchid-growing collective in Quebrada Grande

Through Curubanda Lodge’s ’social tourism’ program, I could have met up with the proprietors of many small, locally-owned businesses in the hill country of Guanacaste, including a bakery in Dos Rios and a small cheese producer in El Consuelo that makes everything by hand and recycles all that they can, including using the pig dung in biodigestors to make methane gas for cooking.

I visited a women’s cooperative in Quebrada Grande that raises orchids and ornamental plants for sales. The cooperative—the Asociacion de Mujeres Activas de Quebrada Grande (The Active Women’s Association of Quebrada Grande) and spoke with sisters Margarita Ponce Ortiz and Mayra Ponce Ortiz. They showed me around the small but impressive vivero (nursery), where they grow orchids (though they say it’s a little too warm there for that ‘crop’), flowering plants, and even reina de la noche (brugmansia) —with its long, fragrant bell-shaped flowers that supposedly have hallucinogenic properties.

A woman's cooperative nursery in Guanacaste

The cooperative began two and a half years ago when the amas de casa (housewives) of this poor town were looking for a way to make a little extra money and to feel util (useful). Quebrada Grande is on a sliver a land between two national parks, and there isn’t much work to be had here. The majority of the people don’t have much education, so their options are even slimmer.

The women took a course with INA (a government agency that provides job training), who came to Quebrada Grande to teach them how to grow and care for plants.

They started with 40 cooperative members, Margarita told me, but are down to 12, because people want fast money, and the nursery is a slow-growing business that requires patience and dedication.

“The men all say women can’t stick with anything, and we want to show them wrong,” said Margarita.

“But right now we’re having trouble because we don’t have a market for our plants. We take them to ferias (farmer’s markets), but we pay so much for transport that we hardly make any profit.” She looked out over the rows of plants. “We’re thinking of building a web page.”

Wilbirth told me on the way back from the visit to the nursery that Curubanda Lodge was also planning a major upgrade to its web site. I told him that most people I know planned trips by doing research on the web, so that was probably time and money well spent.  But the women’s nursery—I’m not sure how they would benefit from a web page.

Vamos a ver. We’ll see.

Curubanda: History and future of a working farm turned ecotourism lodge

Curubanda Lodge in the Guanacaste hill country

Curubanda Lodge is a small ecotourism lodge in the heart of a working farm—Finca Nueva Zealandia–in the Costa Rican highlands. Its four modest but comfortable guest rooms are within spitting distance of the farm’s dairy, chickens wind their way through the gardens, and on your way back to your room you might have to push through the cows waiting to be milked.

Curubanda Lodge in Guanacaste is also a working dairy.

The Nueva Zealandia farm and dairy has been in the Brizuela family since 1930. At that time, there were few roads, and the family would take milk and cheese by oxcart to Quebrada Grande (often shown as Garcia Flamenco), a small town 13 km away, to trade for staples like rice and beans.

The 100-hectare farm stayed pretty much the same, says Wilberth Brizuela Chavarria, 34, from 1930 to 1980, with successive generations working the dairy and in the fields. The area was high and green enough for dairy cattle, but they also kept chickens and pigs.

In 1980, the government was offering nearby land at a very good price if the buyers would agree to help reforest the area (which had been cleared for farms and pastures) so that there might be a biological corridor between the two volcanoes and the two national parks. The Brizuela family bought up land around the original farm and increased their holdings to 350 hectares.

Another big change for the family farm came in 2000, when Wilbirth finished his business degree at Universidad Latina in Santa Cruz (on the Nicoya Peninsula). The price of milk is notoriously volatile, and Wilbirth came home with big ideas about how the family could diversify and not rely solely on the dairy.

A non-paying guest at Curubanda Lodge

Soon after 2000, the farm began its transformation from working farm to working farm that welcomes guests. They built four guest rooms (the best is on the second floor, with a deck, an amazing view, and a bathtub big enough for two). They built a large restaurant, created trails for walking and for horseback riding, landscaped the grounds so that part of it looks more like a hotel than a farm, and are in the process of relocating the dairy barn so it’s not within smelling distance of the guest rooms. (Right now it’s quite close, but the smell isn’t unpleasant, just earthy.)

Agro-Eco-Tourism, complete with mud wallows

Wilberth calls the new project agro-eco-tourism. “It’s a radical change for us,” he says, and indeed it seems as if they are working out some kinks. The guest rooms could use screens on the windows and the water pressure means that the impressive tub takes over an hour to fill up. Guests are fed extremely well but there are no choices—you eat what they’re cooking, and many meals have rice and French fries on the same plate. A friend who came up to watch the sunset drove into a huge swampy hole in the driveway that  was hard to see in the dark and the rain, and upon later inspection that was just one of many tire-swallowing holes. In the Costa Rican manner, Wilbirth smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Who’d be dumb enough to drive into those holes?

Curubanda Lodge: Slipping and sliding to the waterfall

Curubanda Lodge, near Quebrada Grande in the hills of Guanacaste

“Don’t be afraid,” our guide tells us. “It’s a little steep and slippery on the way to the waterfall, but the horses know the way.”

We’ve already come up a trail so muddy the horses sank in past their knees. There were stretches so steep I’d been hugging my horse’s neck to keep upright.

But I wasn’t complaining—yet. We were riding through a dramatic landscape that few would associate with Guanacaste or even Costa Rica. Swaths of dense forest alternated with green hills that might be called rolling if what they were doing wasn’t a lot more dramatic–let’s call them rock-and-rolling hills.  The air was fresco – cool and fresh.  Cacao Volcano lay before us, with Rincon de la Vieja Volcano at our back.

David and I and the guide had started out from Curubanda Lodge, four comfortable cabins on the Finca Nueva Zealandia (New Zealand farm, for the area’s resemblance to that country). We were just over an hour from the baking-hot town of Liberia (the hottest in all of Costa Rica), where there’s an international airport and more banks per square meter than anywhere else in Costa Rica, and two hours from the party beach town of Tamarindo.

If you’re not crazy about extreme heat or spring-break style revelry, then Curubanda is a breath of fresh and cool air. At well over 2000 feet, it lies in a perpetually green valley between two volcanoes, and is sandwiched between two national parks—Rincon de la Vieja and the Guanacaste Protected Area.

The path to the waterfall at Curubanda Lodge

We’re riding through what they call bosque seco (dry forest), though you wouldn’t know it from the rain squalls and the clouds scudding through. “The clouds here haul ass,” says a local expat rancher from California who’s been here a decade and says that the area’s microclimates are so very micro that it can be raining out his back door when the sun is shining on his front yard.

This morning we’re riding 3 of the farm’s 22 horses, trying to catch of glimpse of the volcanoes’ steeply sloping cones, and marveling at the view from the ridges—we can see over multiple ridges in myriad shades of green, all the way to the where the Pacific would be if the haze of the lowlands wasn’t obscuring it today.

We’re well-fortified with a farmhand’s breakfast—eggs, gallo pinto (rice and beans), toast, a plate of fresh pineapple, papaya, apple, and watermelon, and a dollop of delicious fresh cheese (the farm is primarily a dairy, with 80 Holstein, Jersey, and Pardo cows).

Still, I’m not feeling too good about the steep and slippery descent to the waterfall. I guess I could dismount and do it on foot, but one of the reasons they encourage exploring the area on horseback is that hay culebras (there are snakes, including terciopelos (fer-de-lances) and matahueyes (literally “ox-killers,” aka bushmasters). The lodge has loaned us tall rubber boots, but still, I guess I’ll take my chances on horseback.

Our guide is William (lots of people around here have anglicized names, though they may speak no English and have no English heritage). He’s from Nicaragua originally –we’re not far from the border here, and the clouds we see probably formed over Lake Nicaragua. He carries a machete to whack away some of the branches encroaching on the trail, and to have a weapon against culebras.

I take a deep breath and give my horse, Palomo, a gentle kick so he’ll follow the other two, which have begun to slip and slide down the narrow, root-encrusted trail. It’s not my first time on horseback but it’s the first time I’ve seen how horses can slide stiff-legged for yards and then right themselves. The horses nimbly pick their way over fallen trees, rocks, and through mud bogs.

We’re almost to the bottom of this steep stretch when the guide’s horse loses his footing. The rear feet slide out from under him and he goes down, sliding on his rump for several yards.

I pull my horse up short as I watch the spectacle. But William doesn’t bat an eye, just pulls up on the reins until his horse regains all four feet.

I turn to David. “I thought you said these horses couldn’t lose their footing.”

David laughs. “I guess I must have meant mules.”

Soon we dismount, clamber on foot down an even steeper stretch (No hay muchas culebras aqui, says William—There aren’t so many snakes right here), cross a small river, and round a bend to see a small waterfall cascading into a round pool. The mist from the falls drifts over to us, and we breathe it in, watching a blue morpho butterfly ride the currents of air produced by the falling water.

All photos by David W. Smith

The trail to the waterfall was steep and muddy, but it was worth the trip.

Longtime expat writes memoir of Costa Rica

Sandy Shaw's house, overlooking Lake Arenal; photo by David W. Smith

Sandra Shaw Homer, who has lived in Costa Rica for over 20 years, did something a little over a year ago that all writers will applaud and probably envy. She pared away from her life all but the essential, so that she might, for a year, concentrate on writing the book she knew she was meant to write.

And dammit of she didn’t write that book! In a year.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Lake Arenal, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

Click here for more on Evelio’s Garden and the read an excerpt.

Fuentes Verdes: Keeping Lake Arenal blue, the lakeside green, and developers honest

Unfinished condo project near Lake Arenal, Costa Rica

“We’re not the ugly police,” says Ed Yurica, president of Fuentes Verdes, an environmental watchdog group in the Lake Arenal area of Costa Rica. “What we’re about is water. No one gets to mess with our water.”

He and Sandra Shaw Homer (the former president of Fuentes Verdes) are catching me up on all the new development in the area. We’re talking about a local condo project that is an undeniable eyesore, reminding me of an unfinished cell block with killer views of the lake. But the project’s aesthetics are not  the problem, Ed and Sandy tell me.

“They have no water,” says Ed. “Can you imagine—hundreds of supposedly high-end condos and they haven’t secured water rights?”

Fuentes Verdes sees projects like this one all the time, and they try to bring any permitting or environmental problems to the attention of the local officials or, if necessary, national institutions, who aren’t always vigilant in policing big developers.

Through an outsider’s eyes, the land around lovely Lake Arenal looks mostly unspoiled. But Ed and Sandy aren’t outsiders. Ed, 59, is medio-Tico (half Costa Rican): his grandfather was a founding father of Tilaran, a town just west of the lake. Then his mother went and married a gringo and Ed lived in Seattle for a long while, so he’s also norteAmericano, with the accent and the “terrible Spanish” (he claims) to prove it.  Sandy, in her early sixties and originally from the East Coast of the U.S., has lived on the lake for two decades, speaks Spanish very well, and has become more and more prone to fits of rage, she half-jokes, when she sees yet another foreign developer come in and think he can run roughshod over local laws and over the land itself.

Two situations in particular are sticking in Fuentes Verdes’ collective craw, and they stand for the dozens of other affronts to the land and culture that are visited on this area every year.

So many condos, so little (legal) water

The first is the unfinished cellblock of 315 condos going by the name of Maleku, perched on a ravaged hillside above the lake’s northwest shore. Ironically, they’ve appropriated the name of a nearby indigenous tribe (the Maleku), perhaps to make the project seem native to Costa Rica. The developer is from Canada.

“They had to cut away half of a mountainside before they could start the building,” says Sandy, which caused some erosion problems during building and is likely to cause more.  But an even bigger problem is that the project has no water.”

The project started well enough.  SETENA (part of MINAE, the Ministry in charge of how building projects affect the environment) approved the project’s Environmental Impact Study (required of projects here in Costa Rica since 1995). And the project secured a building permit from the local municipality. But one of the trickiest things, even in this country where, during the wet season,  rain-swollen rivers wash out bridges and (on a more positive note) heavy rains create the opportunity for hydroelectric power, is making sure there’s a reliable source of clean water for any new development, a source that doesn’t threaten the supply of nearby communities.

Developers either negotiate directly with AYA, the national water company, or (more commonly) they make a deal with the local ASADAs, water committees that are the only organizations legally allowed to provide a hookup to a locally-controlled water supply. ASADAs tap springs or other water sources, create the infrastructure to deliver that water to people and businesses, and then regulate the delivery of that water.

“Local ASADAs are getting smart,” says Sandy. “They know they have a valuable commodity. Often they’ll negotiate with developers, saying, ‘Ok, you build a certain amount of infrastructure, and pay this much for the water, and we’ll have a deal.’ But it can take a long time to come up with a workable solution.”

Apparently the developers of Maluku didn’t want to wait or go through the proper channels. Rumor has it that they’re buying water from a local farmer. But it’s illegal in  Costa Rica for an individual to sell water—water rights are sacrosanct, with a healthy environment actually guaranteed by the constitution—and water must be regulated by the appropriate national or local water board.

Another problem with the Maleku development is density. “The typical project around the lake,” says Sandy, “is a gated community of many large lots. These have their own problems, but with a high-density project the potential problems escalate exponentially.”

Supermarket in Tilaran draining its waste into the town aquafier

Pali supermarket in Tilaran was set to drill down into the town's aquafier to drain their waste water.

Pali is a national supermarket chain that has stores all of Costa Rica, including on the middle of Tilaran. Recently it set up an extensive drilling rig in its parking lot. “Supposedly the idea,” writes Ed Yurika in a recent Fuentes Verdes email newsletter, “was to dig a hole to put their aquas residuales in. Now if I have this right those are the waste fluids that come from washing down their butcher shop and vegetables and floors and whatever else they clean.”

So why is that a problem?

“Tilaran is essentially built over a lot of water,” writes Ed. “The aquifer below is extensive. So if one perforates this aquifer and dumps aquas residuales down that hole, I would ask what happens to the water supply of Tilaran?”

What, indeed? Check with Fuentes Verdes to see how both these stories will end.