SARAPIQUÍ — From the wooden balcony of his farmhouse, Gabriel Carvajal can see his own history: the shaggy treetops he climbed as a child and the river stream where he taught his sons to swim, nestled along the stretch of rolling hills his grandparents settled on nearly a century ago.
A third-generation farmer, Carvajal, 48, grew up in nature’s classroom in the rural canton of Sarapiquí in north central Costa Rica. He learned how to select seeds and conserve water with his fingers in the dirt, reading the area’s natural conditions. His parents followed their siblings into the business of selling the coffee, pepper and heart of palm they grew in the rich tropical soil.
“For many people, this is a way of life,” Carvajal said. “For us, it is a passion.”
The land has changed since his grandparents’ generation, he said. The soil is now more compacted and more acidic beneath the beating of cow hooves and heavy rains.
The economic landscape has changed, too.
Once the crux of economic activity in Costa Rica, agriculture has dropped in its shares of employment and GDP value since the 1960s, as workers transition into higher-paying industries.
Agriculture accounted for 50% of Costa Rica’s workforce in 1965. By 1987, that share had dropped by almost half, to 28%. In 2013, the country’s Ministry of Public Education eliminated agricultural education as an independent subject within the general curriculum, collapsing it under science.
Those remaining in the agricultural sector, who now make up 13% of the workforce, contend with a waning relevance, not because food production has become any less necessary for survival but because the national economy — and the national image — bows to a new king: ecotourism.
Hosting 5% of the world’s biodiversity and 2.9 million tourists in 2024, Costa Rica reaps international praise for its coupling of environmental conservation with foreign travel, a model that has grown both its forest cover and economy since the early 1990s.
“Tourism is, without a doubt, the most important economic activity in Costa Rica,” said Minister of Tourism William Rodríguez, pointing to the near-quarter of the workforce tourism employed directly and indirectly last year.
Within this robust national industry, environmental sustainability adopts a narrowed focus, one defined by eco-lodges and guided nature walks. Traditional farming practices also have slipped away as monoculture plantations and chemical pesticide use dominate Costa Rica’s fruit export industries.
Carvajal knows it.
When a failed pepper crop bankrupted his farm in 2017, his family turned to a different seed to sow: promoting sustainable agriculture. The family opened Finca Ecoorganica Sarapiquí, or Sarapiquí Eco-organic Farm, inviting visitors to tour or lodge on their property and learn organic crop cultivation techniques. Across the 10-acre stretch of land, a symphony of produce grows, from pineapples, papayas and passion fruit to coffee and cacao.
“Having this project allows us to show people better ways of relating to the environment and, above all, that it can be profitable for their families,” Carvajal said.
Left off the map
Despite decades of Ticos (as Costa Ricans colloquially refer to themselves) reimagining their livelihoods for the tourist’s eye, not all locals reap the same level of access to, much less benefits from, the tourism industry.
Small farms across the country have opened themselves to tourists’ outings, Carvajal said, whereas 10 years ago not nearly as many enterprises existed. But tourism remains unevenly distributed across the country, with rural communities like Sarapiquí especially disadvantaged.
“The issue is ease,” Carvajal explained. “There are already places Ticos have set up to receive tourists,” whether because of their hotel quality, preplanned logistics or longstanding relationships with tour agencies, who often act as the gatekeepers of tourist travel destinations.
Carvajal estimated that Sarapiquí receives around 5% of the total tourists entering the country — a cycle compounded when fewer foreign dollars pouring into the area mean fewer funds to invest in pro-tourist provisions.
“If you look through all the tourism agencies on the internet,” he said, “you’ll see the destinations are the same.”
One of the most popular ones lies just a little over an hour’s drive west of Sarapiquí, as dwellings splayed along a winding expanse of green give way to a downtown of local shops and restaurants pressing together.
La Fortuna, a national tourist hotspot, rests at the base of the Arenal Volcano, the real mountain a backdrop to its own depiction on business banners and in souvenir snow globes.
Before it became the town’s prized attraction, the volcano was an arbiter of destruction, erupting in a sudden and violent blast of smoke, ash and lava that lasted several days in 1968. The molten release buried the small villages of Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luís, killing 87 people.
For Arnaldo and Vilma Cedeño, 84 and 79, little has changed about their rural lifestyle in the decades since then, even as pastures have turned to tourist-ready pavement around them.
“We don’t live like many others, who run around and around and around,” Vilma Cedeño said.
The Cedeños' daughter Lupita was only 6 months old when the volcano exploded, but she can recount the story with the same precision as her parents, who lived on a neighboring cattle ranch and felt the eruption’s trembles before witnessing its devastation.
The volcano kept erupting in smaller bursts after 1968 until 2010, a spectacle of glowing red that sent vibrations through every door and window almost daily, Lupita Cedeño said. The first wave of tourists arrived by the time she was 18.
Then came the hotels. The hot springs resorts. The souvenir stores, like the one Lupita Cedeño would eventually open after leaving her parents’ farm to study accounting.
Fury and fortune: Lupita Cedeño describes the Arenal Volcano eruption that changed the future of La Fortuna -- and her family. (Kat Tran/WUFT News)
Still, she said she worries about the future of La Fortuna if ecotourism continues to boom, bringing an increasing number of travelers.
“We’re sharing something that does not belong to either of us (tourists or locals),” Lupita Cedeño said. “It belongs to Mother Nature.”
Her parents still cling to their land, with its chickens and corn machine and sugar cane, despite pressure from the town to build and sell, Lupita Cedeño said.
She visits them through a back door in her shop, steps away from their plant-filled front porch, and holds onto a hope that when she retires, she can live out her days on a farm of her own.
When tourists stopped coming
Two years after he opened his farm to tours, Carvajal could nearly taste the new fruits of his labor. He had tour agencies lined up to bring visitors. June 2020 looked especially packed with bookings.
Then, in March 2020, the pandemic hit. Twelve days after confirming its first COVID case, Costa Rica closed its borders.
Cut from their access to tourists, the family struggled to pay their bank credit, light bills and phone bills — the kind of things you can pay for only with money, Carvajal said, not barter for with a chicken or a pig.
But at least they could still eat.
“We as a family, with our four hectares, have more than enough to be self-sufficient in our food and to sustain ourselves solely from the land,” Carvajal said they realized during the pandemic. “It was our trial by fire.”
The Carvajals traded milk, coffee, peppers, lettuce and hearts of palm with their neighbors, receiving tuna and spaghetti in return. People gave what they had, or what they had leftover, Carvajal said.
They were the lucky ones.
In the evergreen Monteverde, the birthplace of ecotourism in Costa Rica, the travel restrictions cut off the economy’s oxygen, devastating the small town’s 5,000 residents. Nationally, the unemployment rate shot up to 16.4% in 2020, a 52% increase from the previous year.
Freddy Loria, a Monteverde barber, remembered days during the pandemic when he didn’t cut a single person’s hair. He would stroll the sloped streets outside his shop — sidewalks that normally filled with footsteps, roads that hummed with revving engines — and not run into a soul.
“You’d see it and say to yourself, ‘My God, what’s going to happen?’” Loria said. Many times, the only response the 67-year-old could muster was to sit on his sofa and cry.
The pandemic exposed a deep crack in Costa Rica’s tourist-dependent economy — a model that, unlike its biologically rich environment, lacks diversity.
“You can't really, over a long time, sustainably maintain an economy if it's based on only one thing,” said Jannelle Wilkins, a consultant for the Center for Responsible Travel and former director of the Monteverde Institute.
A return to local agriculture, the livelihood on which Monteverde was founded, could strengthen the economy’s self-sufficiency, Wilkins added.
In 2020, Costa Rica’s agricultural employment rose one percentage point, its highest annual increase in over 10 years. But this share dropped steeply in the years since, now lower than it was in 2013.
Tourism, meanwhile, is back, hovering beneath its 2019 peak of 3.2 million people. Its viability for the economy requires a variety in, at least, the types of tourism offered, Wilkins said. That means not just ecotourism but educational, adventure, homestay and rural options.
The goal is to involve different parts of the population in the tourism industry, Wilkins said, “but that it doesn’t become perhaps the only thing they do.”
Loria agrees. “It’s beneficial to not put all your eggs in one basket,” he said.
Loria moved from the neighboring town of Guacimal over three decades ago in search of better job opportunities. Dominated by dairy farming then, Monteverde offered an uncompetitive market for service-based work like haircutting.
After opening his barbershop, Loria and his wife opened a soda, or local restaurant, and then a bed and breakfast. But the barber still speaks of his father’s farm where he was raised cultivating rice, beans, cheese and coffee, eating only what they grew themselves. He left after his father sold the farm when Loria was 33.
“There should be people who apply themselves to other fields, who work the land,” Loria said. “There’s many ways you can make a living.”
Planting a different future
From the wooden balcony of his farmhouse in Sarapiquí, Carvajal can see his future: an endless stretch of green, where he grows his hope to inspire a new understanding of the earth in each of his visitors.
Among them are local children.
A farmer’s philosophy: Gabriel Carvajal, a multi-generation farmer, explains why it’s so challenging for rural business owners to reap their share of Costa Rica’s tourism benefits. (Kat Tran/WUFT News)
In 2023, Carvajal began the project Sowing for Tomorrow, a collaboration with Sarapiquí schools that brings children on scheduled field trips to his farm, where they learn agricultural practices through direct contact with the soil, as Carvajal did decades ago.
“Most kids don’t know how to plant, much less that they can make a living from agriculture,” Carvajal said.
The program has been a blessing, he added, because he can introduce younger generations to the importance of not just agriculture but the planet.
After sunset, when the mountain silhouettes beyond the river have faded into a gray sky, Carvajal’s wife stands at the kitchen stove, preparing a dinner of rice with beans and pork. A slip of paper glued to the kitchen’s wooden beam reads, “Don’t stop until you’re proud,” in Spanish and English.
Tomorrow, the family will rise with the sun again, sipping coffee together before they return to tend to the land.
