Florida and Costa Rica have a lot in common: Gorgeous beaches with nesting sea turtles. Tall palm trees. Forests that provide habitat to two of the world’s great cats, the Florida panther and the jaguar, keystone species in their ecosystems that need room to roam in fast-developing places.
Florida and Costa Rica are also two of the world’s tourism hot spots. As Florida last year hit its record number of tourists in state history — 142.9 million visitors in 2024 — ecotourism experts say the Sunshine State could take inspiration from Costa Rica in protecting natural assets and helping visitors learn to appreciate them even more.
Born and raised in Venice on Florida’s west coast, Pete Corradino grew up at the Florida Monkey Sanctuary, a 10-acre private, nonprofit owned and operated by his parents from 1968 to 1988. Today, he owns Everglades Day Safari and serves as chairman of the board of the Florida Society for Ethical Ecotourism (SEE).
Nature tourism leaders founded the organization in southwest Florida more than a quarter century ago to help guide a sustainable tourism ethic in a state that was — and still is — home to alligator wrestling, spring breakers who trample sand dunes and speeding motor boats that can harm manatees. It advocates “authentic ecotourism” that keeps tourism profits in local communities and supports conservation and restoration so tourists still have a real Florida to visit.
As Carradino leads visitors on day trips through the Florida Everglades, he also helps them understand what’s at stake as the state continues to lose an estimated 45,000 acres a year to development. “If we don’t protect that, we’ve got nothing,” Corradino says. “I don’t shy away from that on my tours. I will tell people as we go — this is a resource we’re losing right now.”
An original nature destination
Florida’s first tourists were drawn by nature, not amusement parks. Glass-bottom boats plied Silver Springs in the 1870s. Northerners including Harriet Beecher Stowe came down for steamboat trips on wild rivers like the Ocklawaha with its giant cypress trees, hanging moss and alligators lining the banks. “A fairyland,” Stowe called it. “A spectacle weird, wondrous, magical, to be remembered as one of the things of a lifetime.”
Tourism exploded after 1945, according to the Florida State Library and Archives, and nature was the crowd-pleaser. Jungle-type attractions like McKee Jungle Gardens near Vero Beach marketed monkey encounters. Weeki Wachee Springs hired its first mermaids.
Post World War II, lots of those tourists decided to move to Florida. The growth was so “successful” that it also led to the kinds of development, including mega hotels and highways, that can change an area’s main feel from wild to mass tourism, said Taylor Stein, an ecotourism professor at the University of Florida’s School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences.
Today, advocates in both Florida and Costa Rica worry that overdevelopment threatens to “kill the chicken with the golden egg,” as Fernanda Mora, co-founder of Anti-Gentrification Costa Rica puts it. Natural beauty, authentic cultural experiences and wild animals can’t be marketed if they’re not there, Mora says.
Florida’s chicken has been on the chopping block ever since engineers began to drain the Everglades in the 19th century. Carradino explains to visitors that scientists estimated South Florida has the water to support 3.5 million people sustainably; the southern tip of Florida is now home to 7 million people. “If you can't protect the water, and you keep eating away at it and building homes,” he tells them, “we're not going to have the resource. We're not going to have the places for us to hike, canoe, to paddle, to do any of those things.”
Costa Rica as a model
Founders of the Florida Society for Ethical Ecotourism looked at Costa Rica as one of their models for how the state could push beyond seeing nature as an amenity. The nonprofit organization’s mission is “Responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.”
SEE developed certification for Florida tourism businesses modeled in part on Costa Rica’s Certification for Sustainable Tourism, established by the government as a voluntary assessment. Visitors can seek out companies that model best sustainable tourism practices in how they work with and impact natural, cultural and social resources.
SEE’s certification set out to endorse providers “who contribute to the environmental, social and economic sustainability of Florida.” But the effort stalled along with the tourism industry during COVID-19, Carradino says. The organization plans to relaunch the effort statewide this year.
Environmental education and awareness are fundamental parts of the work. Carolyn Kovacs is a Florida Sea Grant/IFAS Extension agent in Volusia and Flagler counties, where thousands of loggerhead and green sea turtle mothers make their way onto the beaches to nest between May and October. They are threatened by human disturbances that can include parties on the beaches at night or artificial lighting. But even something as seemingly harmless as digging a big hole in the sand during the day, Kovacs says, can harm a turtle that falls into it at night.
“If you dig a hole in the sand, it’s important to fill it back up when you leave. Because otherwise sea turtles can get stuck in there,” says Kovacs. She is working with local organizations on a series of videos for hotel chains on how visitors can help sea turtles, sand dunes and other beach wonders.
“If it’s wild, leave it wild”
As in Costa Rica, animal encounters can be a point of tension and misunderstandings for tourists visiting Florida, one of the most biodiverse states in the nation with some 4,000 land and aquatic animals. Visitors don’t even have to step foot in a park to encounter alligators or threatened birds like sandhill cranes.
Corradino says reality shows like “Gator Boys” and “Swamp People” can give the wrong impression to people about how they can interact with alligators. He sees the lack of awareness when people on his tours want to get surprisingly close to alligators, or ask him why they can’t feed them.
“That’s our opportunity to let them know, if you feed wildlife, they’re going to lose their fear, and that’s going to be dangerous for the next person who comes along,” he says.
“If it’s wild, leave it wild.”
Costa Rica is among the top 10 countries in the world for environmental protection, including laws and policies to safeguard its wild animals and their habitats, according to the global Nature Conservation Index maintained by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The United States is 37th on the Index, which analyzes land management; threats to biodiversity; capacity and governance; and future trends.
Costa Rica’s strict wildlife protection laws ban hunting for sport (indigenous groups can still hunt for sustenance); feeding wild animals; and handling wild animals including for selfies. The nation shuttered the last of its zoos last year.
It’s a far alligator cry from Florida, where tourists can literally feed alligators between putt-putt golf holes at five Smugglers Cove mini-golf courses.
Orlando’s Gatorland grew out of an alligator pit for tourists and opened as a roadside attraction in 1949. It draws an estimated 400,000 visitors a year for entertainment that includes alligator wrestling.
In the jungles of Costa Rica or the swamps of Florida, the major threat the tourism industry poses to animals is the march of development into habitat. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office in 2023 worked on a plan to build hotels and golf courses on preserved state park land. The Florida Legislature this spring is debating a bill that would prohibit such amenities in the state’s park system, which markets its 175 parks, trails and historic sites with “the Real Florida” tagline.
Both Costa Rica and Florida are working to build contiguous wildlife corridors with a combination of public and private lands to give imperiled animals like big cats the habitat they need, and to protect them from vehicle strikes. The Florida Wildlife Corridor covers almost 17.7 million acres across Florida. Costa Rica has 44 defined corridors that spread across 4 million acres across the country. For context, Florida is over three times larger than Costa Rica.
“Local, local, local”
Ecotourism, itself, is now often cited as a reason for protecting Florida’s environment. Corradino said Florida SEE wants to “keep pushing that ecotourism should be the biggest driver because that is the most sustainable way of protecting the resource, and protecting the tourism industry because if we don't, the whole thing collapses.”
But while Florida ecotourism is making progress in education and conservation goals, industry leaders admit that the third aim — tourism that “improves the well-being of local people” is elusive.
Tourism generates 2 million Florida jobs and $131 billion in visitor spending, according to Visit Florida statistics. But low-wage workers often can’t afford to live near the tourist destinations where they work. And local tourism businesses are struggling to compete with chains, particularly after major disruptions, including COVID-19 and hurricanes such as Ian that razed southwest Florida beaches in 2022.
University of South Florida sustainable tourism professor Brooke Hansen says “it’s important for tourists to ask things” they care about before they decide how to spend their hard-earned vacation dollars. In both Costa Rica and Florida, “we need to make sure that we’re empowering local communities and local people to own these businesses.”
Stein, the University of Florida ecotourism professor, has been leading student study abroad trips to Costa Rica for a quarter century, and working to build the Florida industry for as long. Establishing a certification program within the state government, in Costa Rica's model, "would elevate the concept of sustainable tourism to a level where we might see some good happen."
Costa Rica’s government is also better about working with local people to create partnerships, he says, and tries to be intentional about hiring local guides for federal positions in national parks or refuges. Someone who grew up in those forests could be more of an “expert” than an outsider who studied them from afar.
Still, when outsiders invest — either in Costa Rica or Florida — tourism “leakage” happens. That’s when revenue generated by tourism leaks out of the pockets of local people and the community, enriching the outside corporation or investors instead.
“I think it’s really important going forward to focus on local, local, local, because if tourism isn’t raising all boats, then it’s not a positive force,” says Hansen at the University of South Florida. “And we want it to be across the world, and I really think it can be.”
