cover of Neotropica's first issue

Excerpts from a 15th-century account of Christopher Columbus “discovering paradise” in the New World. A philosophical rumination on “Before Paradise was Necessary.” A report on what expats in Costa Rica think about their Central American paradise, illustrated with images from Alice in Wonderland.

Neotropica is not your average travel magazine. The beautifully designed first issue, titled “Imagined Geographies of Paradise,” is a headlong plunge into history, myth, and culture. Available online, the magazine is laid out like a full-color academic journal, lavishly illustrated with photographs, prints from old trip journals, and reproductions of paintings, like Spanish painter Remedios Varo’s haunting and surreal “Exploration of the Source of the Orinoco.”

Founder and Editor-in-Chief Stephen Duplantier says he hopes Neotropica becomes “a widely-read journal of important ideas for all of Central America. The region is diverse and the archaeologies, histories, and traditions are thickly layered.”

"Exploration of the Source of the Orinoco," a painting by Remedios Varo

Duplantier and his wife Kathleen moved from Louisiana to the hills above San Ramon, Costa Rica, in 2004. Back home, he earned a PhD in journalism and and an MS in film and wrote extensively on Louisiana history and folk life. Duplantier also produced ethnographic films about the music and food of French Louisiana.

Now he turns his gaze on his new home—Central America—with the same learned and omnivorous curiosity that he once applied to Louisiana.

Duplantier says he’s seeking Central American artists, writers, and thinkers to help make Neotropica come alive, though at this point the magazine is a collaborative effort that hasn’t been paying its participants.

Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas chronicled the adventures and abuses of Christopher Columbus and other conquistadores

“This is a time for sharing and understanding,” says Duplantier. “We are looking for contributions in Spanish, English, and French that deal with our contested histories, and that try to understand 500 years of colonization. We’re in this together. What can we make of our lives in Central America?”

The second issue of Neotropica will be called The Banana Chronicles, and the 3rd, says Duplantier, will be “an archaeological dig to uncover buried ghosts, disappeared histories, and disappeared bodies of Central America’s past.”

Email Stephen Duplantier at editorneotropica@gmail.com

Read Neotropica online

Sign near nearly-invisible petroglyphs in Las Lilas, Costa Rica; photo by David W. Smith

In the tiny town of Las Lilas, near Quebrada Grande, there’s a rock with petroglyphs that they’ve put a little tin roof over to protect, and a sign that shows you what the faint carvings would look like if you could see them clearly.

River near Las Lilas; photo by David W. Smith

The Guanacaste highlands, with Rincon de la Vieja volcano in the background; photo by David W. Smith

Over the river and through the woods, then over another creek and up along a fence line, in view of Rincon de la Vieja volcano, we found a flattish rock at the top of a hill with what looked like very old carvings. The person who showed us the place brought chalk, and he outlined some of the designs so they’d be more visible.

There were/are many tribes in the Rincon de la Vieja area, including the Curubande and the Guatuso.

Chalk-enhanced petroglyphs near Quebrada Grande; photo by David W. Smith

Detail of chalk-enhanced petroglyph in the Guanacaste highlands; photo by David W. Smtih

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.