Luxury Ocean Residences in Costa Rica

You may have forgotten just how exquisite the night sky can be without interference from that ever-present luminous security blanket with which the modern world drapes itself. In fact, if you grew up in an urban or suburban area, you may never have experienced it. Thus, when you think “night sky,” you automatically squint, straining to see those few faint twinkles that hover here and there on the outer edge of the pervasive light-haze dome overhead. Docile. Unobtrusive. Unprovocative. Frankly, unimpressive.

In that case, nothing could prepare you for the bottomless black-of-the-timeless-void expanse ablaze and alive with an infinity of shimmering orbs in an astounding diversity of galaxies that will have you grasping at the beach grass for a handhold should you be lucky or smart enough to make it to Ballena beach on Costa Rica’s south Pacific coast. Roaming satellites, orbiting space station, the dash-to-the-death of random meteors…constellations, anyone? By God, there’s a universe out there!

Of course, if you were really clever you’d realize that this is a place that merits further exploration; it’s a place you’ll want to share with your friends and family, with your children, with your grandchildren.

Were that your decision, you would likely find Canto Ballena Secluded Ocean Residences to be perfectly suited to your plans. Canto Ballena Residences are nestled in the heart of Costa Rica’s Ballena coast, an exquisite stretch of unspoiled beaches and lush rainforest-covered mountains that extends south from Dominical towards the Osa peninsula on the south Pacific coast of this remarkable Central American country.

Because of its historical remoteness, this area remained virtually untouched by successive waves of development that spread throughout other regions of Costa Rica over the past few decades. Only with the recent opening of the beautiful Costanera Highway has the outside world gained easy access to what can be described as a veritable natural treasure trove of flora and fauna. This delayed debut made it possible for the Ballena coast’s extraordinarily rich ecological zone to benefit from hard lessons learned elsewhere.

Learning from errors is something that Costa Rica does remarkably well. It is a country that has sampled from a smorgasbord of global missteps—from the folly of small nations maintaining standing armies to the penny-wise-pound-foolish trap of pall mall development and inadequate resource management—extracted the hard lessons, and turned them into social and economic policies that engage both the private and public sectors in a successful national development process. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Consider the evidence.

It’s fair to say that most cosmopolitan travelers are aware that Costa Rica enjoys one of the most exquisitely diverse and breathtakingly beautiful landscapes on Earth, and all packed into a deceptively small 19,730 square miles (51,100 sq km) tucked between the Caribbean and Pacific oceans just north of Panama.

Most are likely to know that Costa Rica is a long-standing democracy with the courage and foresight to constitutionally abolish its military in 1949, freeing funds for comprehensive health and educational systems that have helped Costa Ricans achieve a standard of living envied by their neighbors—and many others around the world.

Fewer may be aware, however, of the full extent of Costa Rica’s biological inventory. For example, Costa Rica has more bird species (838) than the United States and Canada combined, more varieties of butterflies (1,239) than in all of Africa, more than twice as many mammals as Great Britain (232), and some 12,000 species of plants overall (including more than 1,000 varieties of orchids). Costa Rica is, as former minister of natural resources Alvaro Urmana put it, “a biological superpower.”

Remarkably, at the very dawn of the mass global environmental awakening, Costa Rica took stock and decided that protecting its bountiful natural heritage should be a national priority. To that end, sustainability has long been a central concept in Costa Rican development policies.

In 1970, with concern growing over the rapid disappearance of the region’s once endemic rainforests, the Costa Rican government established a national park system that today finds more than 24% of all national territory in an extensive array of parks, refuges, and protected zones, 31% if private reserves are included.

What’s more, the government devised a number of innovative mechanisms to promote reforestation and forest management, including soft loans, fiscal credits, and direct donations to small landowners.

Together these policies were responsible for the turnaround in Costa Rica’s forest cover. Another important aspect of the country’s sustainability is its energy self-sufficiency. Clean, renewable sources such as hydroelectric generation, wind farms, and geothermal turbines supply 95% of Costa Rica’s electrical needs.

As a country with a longstanding commitment to public education, Costa Rica was keenly aware of the key role of education in the success of its environmental policies. Thus in the 1970s, environmental education began in earnest with the adaptation of social studies and science curricula to include information on Costa Rican biodiversity and the need to protect it, and a range of public campaigns encouraged the public to participate in the preservation of the rainforest and other natural resources.

At the same time, tourism was identified as a viable alternative for generating foreign exchange by a government eager to diversify the economy, given common disruptive fluctuations in the commodities market for traditional Costa Rican products such as coffee and bananas. By the 1980s this new melding of nature and tourism—first called “ecotourism” by noted Mexican architect and environmental activist Héctor Ceballos Lascuráin—was generating serious revenue, and Costa Ricans began to see the direct economic benefits of environmental protection. Some ten years later, Costa Rica was the world’s top ecotourism destination, and for the first time tourism had outperformed coffee and bananas.

As anticipated, ecotourism has been an important step in the country’s economic growth. Many visitors who came primarily to see rainforests were charmed by the Costa Rican people and by the warm friendly atmosphere that pervades the country. Tourists’ enthusiasm convinced major resort brands such as Marriot, Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, Four Seasons, and Hyatt Regency that Costa Rica is a winning destination. Not surprisingly, each of these resort projects features a significant emphasis on environmental sensitivity, and incorporates principles of sustainability into the resort design.

Recently, the Costa Rican government has indicated a need to shift priorities from the development of major tourist centers to the integration of tourism throughout the existing society. To do so, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute is promoting a new “Rural Tourism” program designed to incorporate tourism into typical rural Costa Rican communities alongside long-standing economic practices such as agriculture.

The Rural Tourism program is of great potential benefits to more marginal rural populations who now do not have to abandon traditional lifestyles in order to survive economically, and it provides new jobs in rural zones for Costa Ricans of all ages. For their part, tourists have the opportunity to get to know the “real” Costa Rica and to see the time-honored roots of its pacific, earth-oriented culture.

The launching of this program was the result of yet another innovative Costa Rican initiative between local organizations, private enterprise, and international non-governmental organizations.

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