Tourism means a great deal to the community, the entrepreneur says — genuinely profitable, even with three-quarters of the tourism businesses here foreign-owned. It provides work for at least three thousand people, mostly young people and women, many of them supporting entire families on that income alone. And it isn't just the hotels: sport fishing, tour guiding, taxis, and the shops that live off hotel traffic all draw their living from the same source.
What concerns him is how unevenly those benefits land. The elderly, he points out, barely share in tourism's gains at all — even as the prices they face keep climbing right alongside everyone else's.
A second worry runs even deeper: local people can rarely get the loans they'd need to hold onto and properly maintain their own land, so it gets sold off to foreign buyers far too easily. At times it feels to him like the government even favours those buyers — he points to a Swiss investor who was allowed to start a tourism project without the permits it should have required. Locals and local businesses, he believes, should have a real seat at the table when the municipality makes these decisions.
“We, the local people and local businesses, should be engaged in decision-making by our own municipality.”
Tourists can't fix land policy or municipal permits, he's the first to admit. But there's something simpler they can do: eat and drink more often at Costa Rican–owned restaurants. All it takes is asking around the village which places are Tico-run, and going there instead. The money spent locally stays in the community — and helps keep its cultural identity intact.
Good for tourism, he adds, and good for the tourists too.