As soon as you step off the plane into the busy San José airport, nature is the first thing you see.
Before you get a chance to look out a window, pass through immigration, or have your bag scanned for invasive species, lush green banners enter your field of view.
Most advertise high-end hotels, with the promise of a natural and wildlife-filled vacation.
On your way through security, you’re hit with more nature-based ads, now for Imperial beer. Sip it under a jungle canopy, on a rugged beach, all with the promise that the beer is brewed with “tropical rainwater.”
Costa Rica sells itself as an environmental miracle. And in many ways, it’s true.
Since the early 1970s when it had lost most of its jungles, Costa Rica has managed to reforest more than a fifth of the country, bringing total forest cover to 57%. Today, Costa Rica is also a world leader in clean energy and biodiversity — with more than half a million species, or 5% of all estimated species — living in a small country that makes up only 0.03% of the planet’s landmass.
But beneath the green canopy, cracks are beginning to show. Ecotourism, the very industry that helped rescue Costa Rica’s forests, now strains the nation’s wild places, the animals that inhabit them—and perhaps most importantly, local people, who are increasingly priced out of their own communities.
Costa Rica’s environmental initiatives have more than doubled its forest cover between 1985 and 2020.
Of the 2.9 million foreign tourists who arrived by air in 2024, more than half came from the U.S. Their influence is felt from the English-language real estate signs to the rising rental costs. Similar pressures face the world’s great tourist destinations—including Florida. Driven in part by so-called “Covid-revenge” travel, tourism was the fastest growing sector in the global economy last year. As mass tourism accelerates, local voices in Costa Rica are raising a pressing question: Can the nation's economic and environmental ambitions coexist without undermining local livelihoods?
The seeds of the tension were planted decades ago in the cloud forests of Monteverde, when a small group of American Quakers and scientists helped shape Costa Rica’s modern approach to conservation.
The green mountain town
In 1950, a group of Quakers from Alabama left the United States for Costa Rica to protest militarism, including the draft then leading up to the Korean War; four of their young men had been jailed for refusing to register. They purchased 3,000 acres of land near the tiny town of Santa Elena, and called their settlement “Monteverde.”
The Quakers built a quiet, self-sustaining community nestled high in the mountains, established a barter economy and raised dairy cattle for a cheese factory. Dairy was still a major part of the economy when Joseph Michael Stukey, owner of Restaurante Morpho’s in Santa Elena, was a child.
“When I grew up here, it was basically a dairy farm community and self-sustaining,” Stukey said. “And then they found the golden toad, and so biologists started coming.”
As the Quakers and resident Costa Ricans expanded cattle operations, they carried out slash-and-burn style deforestation throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the anthropologist Luis Vivanco writes in his book “Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica.”
Biologists, too, began to trickle into the cloud forest, in search of the now-extinct golden toad. Even as research activity increased, the relationship between locals and visitors remained personal.
“They’d come for three months to six months, and the community would get together. They’d even knit them a quilt and they'd stay with a family. There was only one hotel,” Stukey remembered.
But as time passed, what had once been working farmland was gradually reclassified as conservation territory. The creation of the Monteverde Cloud Reserve in 1972 marked a turning point. Science and conservation interests began buying up land, driven by the urgent need to preserve biodiversity, and spurred on by low prices. Yet, while the forest was protected, families that depended on it found their land restricted or reclaimed.
Conservation created one of the most pristine cloud forests in the world, managed largely by private interests. And the ecotourists drawn to Monteverde strengthen every aspect of the economy, from restaurants to hardware stores, according to Sofia Santamaria, 21, who works at Ferreteria Agro SoSi in Monteverde.
“The majority of our clients are restaurants and hotels, and when they get movement, we get movement.”
Today, there’s plenty of movement. Despite the partially paved road, winding climb and strong winds, tourists flock to the cloud forests. One morning this spring, camera-ready dozens crammed a narrow hiking trail as they waited for a mother quetzal to return to her nest; the vibrant-plumed bird, an iconic symbol of Costa Rica, stayed away. Dozens more tourists crowded feeders, some coming within inches of violet sabrewings and other hummingbirds.
Watch below: Tourists flock to hummingbird feeders in the Monteverde Cloud Reserve. (Nathan Thomas/WUFT News)
What was once a quiet, close-knit farming hub has become a bustling ecotourism center, its identity reshaped by waves of visitors to the forests that once fed its people.
Disruptions
Costa Rica’s ecotourism model faced its greatest test during the COVID-19 pandemic. With borders shut around the world, individuals and businesses that catered to tourists—hotels, restaurants, tour guides—were forced to shutter or drastically scale back. The sudden loss of income pushed many residents, particularly those in the tourism sector, back to agriculture or informal labor.
“A friend of mine, they had a hotel and everything, he was forced to sell out as soon as the pandemic finished,” said Stukey, the restaurant owner. “The banks, the ones that did give leeway, they're like, OK, cool, don't pay for two years. Two years and one month? You owe us. Pay up now, or we repo.”
Buyers lined up to take over loans, he added.
Monteverde was not alone. According to the World Bank, foreign direct investment increased by over $1 billion between 2020 and 2022, reaching record heights even by pre-pandemic standards. This surge of foreign capital—coupled with post-pandemic economic vulnerability—accelerated land transfers, often from local middle-class families to investors with ties abroad.
A 2025 national survey by the National University of Costa Rica found that 86.8% of Costa Ricans believe that foreigners are taking over land in coastal areas. More than two-thirds of respondents said they believe that “land in the interior of the country is being seized.” On the coast, grassroots anti-gentrification movements have begun to coalesce. Groups like Anti-Gentrification Costa Rica and No to Gentrification have staged protests throughout the country, including in the capitol of San José.
“Most people who move to Costa Rica (or any other Latin American country) after COVID or as digital nomads are chasing the illusion of paradise, unaware of the damage they’re causing to the country and region,” Anti-Gentrification Costa Rica posted on Instagram.
While gentrification challenges the social fabric, growth and development, as well as the climate crisis, threaten the foundations of ecotourism. Thousands of wild animals die from vehicle collisions on Costa Rica's roads each year.
Rising temperatures are altering long-established ecological patterns, and species once central to Costa Rican identity are becoming harder to find. “There's been a decrease in many populations, many groups, and some species that used to be very common in the past,” said Kenneth Alfaro at the La Selva Biological Station in the tropical lowlands to the east. “Now, they're not.”
In Monteverde, warming temperatures are pushing the clouds—and the species that rely on them—higher up the mountainside.
“I mean, there's no moths anymore. It used to be that in the evenings, the entire window would be covered with moths, with every color and every size and there's none anymore,” said Marian Howard, a 90-year-old American expat who moved to Monteverde over 40 years ago.
Still, amid the economic and environmental turbulence, tourism endures as one of the most powerful forces for good in the lives of many Costa Ricans.
A better life
For Raúl Obregón Hernandez, the tourism boom has been life-changing. As a child, he left school in fourth grade to farm with his family. He worked from 4 a.m. to 11 a.m., making about $6 a week. Today, he works as a guide in the Arenal National Park, spending his days escorting groups of tourists up the volcano that has shaped the town of La Fortuna.
“I make a billion times more than $6 working in tourism,” he said.
In La Fortuna, large hotels, independent tour operators and local guides work together through a tourism board, a cooperative effort that ensures the economic benefits of tourism stay within the community, Hernandez and others said.
It’s a stark contrast to coastal regions where foreign investors snap up properties, pricing out locals who are forced to move out. Rents inside the city center are understandably higher, but a 10-minute bus ride away, houses can rent for $100 USD a month, according to Hernandez.
He said he looks forward to seeing La Fortuna continue to develop—on its own terms. He’d like to see it grow large enough to become a county.
“If this becomes a county, that will be a huge thing, which is good. Why? Because they’re going to build a hospital and a lot of benefits will come to the area,” Hernandez said.
Tourism has also changed lives in many agricultural regions of the country. Maria Luz Jiménez, who owns a restaurant and heart of palm plantation, makes her living by showing curious tourists how one of the most versatile foods in the world is grown and prepared.
“Thanks to tourism, my daughters can study,” she said.
Her three daughters all pursued a higher education thanks to their mother’s work expertly dismantling palm trees with her machete. One studied to be a guide for tourists. Another works at Costa Rica’s National Institute of Women. A third is a doctor.
Stories like Raul’s and Maria’s reveal what’s possible when local communities shape their own tourism economies—but that didn’t happen in a vacuum. Networks of support have made this possible, from local cooperatives to national agencies and NGOs.
What do we do?
In Monteverde, a sustainability research organization has been preparing for today’s level of tourism for decades.
The Monteverde Institute was founded in 1986 by a group of Quakers, biologists and conservationists to guide local tourism in a sustainable direction and protect the cloud forest that contains over 2,500 plants; 1,200 amphibians and reptiles; 400 birds; and 100 mammals.
“While tourism cannot be controlled, it is sometimes possible to guide components of it in creative educational ways, and by doing so, develop new jobs and careers for the area residents, as well as create educational and cultural activities for the zone,” said John Russell, one of the founders of the Monteverde Institute.
The Institute stresses that “Sustainability is flexibility,” and that it’s important to tailor practices to the economic and cultural needs of communities. Monteverde faces grey water pollution, so the institute has been working to install “bio-gardens,” which filter grey water through natural processes, throughout the community.
In 2010, the Costa Rican government enacted a law for comprehensive waste management. Among other things, the law establishes three categories of waste, more than most Americans are used to. In Monteverde, in front of many businesses and on streets, there are six categories of waste. While locals have a long-held pride in maintaining their communities, tourists may be more careless, and when there’s millions of them, it can have nasty effects.
“In the high season, with a lot of tourists, we're having more and more garbage in the streets or the places we put our solid waste. And of course, if you separate the recyclables and the organic stuff, the waste is going to reduce a lot,” said the Institute’s communications director, Irene González.
Initiatives such as reforestation projects, waste management programs, and improved water treatment have already begun making a difference. “Right now we have around 6,000 trees that we grew from the seed, and all of these trees are endangered species,” González said.
Anti-gentrification movements are offering solutions of their own, including laws eliminating the investor visa (anyone can become a Costa Rican resident by investing $150,000 in the country); harsher penalties for environmental crimes; and guarantee of dignified housing for all Costa Ricans.
According to Stukey, the restaurant owner, the future ahead largely depends on what people do today to offset the ecological and economic costs of tourism.
“What’s going to happen in the future? Nobody knows. What we can do is to try and offset it as much as possible,” Stukey said. “Every little person can do a little bit every day,” he said.
