Mi Tierra Oranic Farm

The farm organic farm located in Tierra Pacifica is now part of the Mi Tierra brand which includes a retail location at El Centro Verde.  Mi Tierra will offer not only organic fruits and veggies but ornamental and edible landscape plants as well. 

Tropical Fruit Salad Garden

Check out this video that Will and Dylan made on our 1200 square foot tropical fruit salad garden.  We can customize these for any lot to provide you with year round tropical fruit.

Costa Rica: The Next Florida?

Costa Rica: The Next Florida?–The Tico Times Newspaper Costa Rica Business

By Chrissie Long
Tico Times Staff | clong@ticotimes.net

For Lou Aguilera, Costa Rica has all the makings of a retirement destination: a comfortable climate, top-notch health services, close proximity to the United States and Canada, and a stable democracy.
Living Well: Lou Aguilera, the force behind a new retirement community designed to attract an aging international population to Costa Rica, shows of the model of the Pacific Plaza project in Liberia, in the northern Pacific province of Guanacaste. Ground will be broken in May for the ambitious project, which will include a satellite hospital of the upscale CIMA Hospital in Escazú, west of San Jose.

While the country has been successful at marketing itself as an eco-friendly destination and a go-to place for medical tourism, the retiree population persists as an untapped market.

“This represents a bigger potential for Costa Rica than recreational tourism represented 25 years ago,” said Aguilera, who moved to Costa Rica in 2006 to begin work on an over-age 55 development in Guanacaste. “The graying of America is irreversible, and Costa Rica is in a position to service this population.”  Read the entire story here.

Supermercado Junquillal is open for business!

At long last, Supermercado Junquillal has opened! The grocery store, located in the south corner of the Plaza Tierra Pacifica, moved from its former location near the park in Junquillal, and last weekend marked the grand opening. The new grocery store is more than double in size compared to the old one, and boasts the best selection of specialty items, liquor, wine, produce and meat between here and Santa Cruz or Tamarindo.

Over the last several years, Loris, the owner, has impressed locals and tourists by stocking his store, the Mini Super Junquillal, according to their needs and wants. You could ask Loris if he carried an item, and if he didn’t there was a good chance the next time you were in his store he would have ordered and stocked whatever you asked for. While scooting around workers, delivery people and shoppers in the old store, you might come across nori for making sushi, buffalo mozzarella cheese, or even caviar. While not always easy to access, Loris made sure the things people wanted in our small community could be found in his tiny store. The new Supermercado Junquillal, with more space for displaying items as well as a basement storage room, promises to have an even better selection than his old store!

The good news for Ticos is that he is now able to stock much larger quantities of staples, such as rice and beans. For many families who traveled to Santa Cruz on the bus on Saturdays to do the week’s shopping, this now means a short trip to the supermercado. Instead of sweating in the Super Compro with music blaring outside, you can now grab a cart and stroll through wide aisles in the air conditioning – YES! That’s right – the store has A/C throughout! In addition to these luxuries, there are 2 checkout lanes, a new computerized point of sale system, and new shelves and fixtures. Gone are the days of leaning over the meat and cheese case in the old store, shouting, “No, the one in front, no in front of that one…no no, over one more, yes, the cheese!” An attached deli is in the works but not yet ready to open, and the Plaza offers beautiful outdoor patio seating, perfect for enjoying lunch or a book in the shade.


As the anchor tenant in Plaza Tierra Pacifica, the Supermercado Junquillal will bring foot and auto traffic to the plaza. With the eventual addition of a veterinarian, pharmacy and souvenir shop, Plaza Tierra Pacifica will be a thriving business center that serves the needs of Tierra Pacifica and the surrounding community for years to come.

Costa Rica Targets Retirees

COSTA RICA: Headhunting First-World Seniors - IPS ipsnews.net

COSTA RICA: Headhunting First-World Seniors
By Daniel Zueras

SAN JOSÉ, Mar 8, 2010 (IPS) - The Costa Rican government has declared retirement communities, aimed at attracting U.S. pensioners, to be "of national interest." Plans to create "retirement clusters" providing complete health services for older adults are seen as a profitable prospect for this Central American country.

Old people as a business: this is the bottom line of the government and private sector's new project.

Noting the rapid development of the "health cities" in Mexico and Panama, Costa Rican officials and entrepreneurs are poised to tap into the perceived gold mine among middle and upper-middle class senior citizens of industrialised countries.

The concept is simple, and includes slashing red tape to the minimum by providing one-stop residence permits at the Migration Directorate, so that foreigners, especially the well-heeled, can come to live in the country.

Tax exemptions on real estate and vehicles are on offer, and a promotional campaign aimed at older adults abroad will be run by the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism (ICT). The government will also boost training of human resources such as health personnel through the Costa Rican Social Security system, and seek to attract investment.

The Competitiveness Ministry has already identified eight locations for retirement clusters in Costa Rica, in areas of natural beauty with plenty of tourist attractions, and close to large hospital complexes.

Promoting Costa Rica as a retirement haven includes much more than boosting real estate sales or medical tourism. "It includes the hotel sector, travel, hospitals and research. Costa Rica will benefit from it," Competitiveness Minister Jorge Woodbridge told IPS. Patients and their relatives are likely to travel all over the country, staying at hotels and engaging tour operators and so on.

Every 10,000 retirees are expected to generate employment for 40,000 people a year, 10,000 of them in direct jobs and 30,000 indirectly. The average income of the target population (middle and upper-middle class U.S., Canadian and Spanish citizens) is 3,500 dollars a month.

The main Costa Rican medical centres are already building two major hospital complexes in the city of Liberia in Guanacaste province, the top tourist destination in the country. They will comprise a hospital and residential zone, where services will be provided for four levels of care: active retirement, independent living, assisted living and skilled nursing, in increasing order of patient need.

A small retirement community for 12 people, the country's only operational cluster so far, has opened on the slopes of the Poas volcano.

The owner, Ronald García, told IPS that "coming to Costa Rica has economic advantages" for foreign pensioners. "They pay for accommodation and medical care, and a family visit from home once a month, and it costs less than paying for medical services back home," he said. His customers pay 1,600 dollars a month, whereas in the United States they would have to pay 4,500 dollars a month for comparable services.

"We want to attract 10,000 pensioners a year," Woodbridge said. Estimated annual foreign exchange earnings per 10,000 retirees are 340 million dollars, "so in five years, the total would be 1.7 billion dollars," he calculated.

In any case, the plan will take at least five years to take off as a national strategy, Foreign Trade Minister Marco Vinicio Ruiz told IPS.

Other Latin American countries have a head start on Costa Rica. Mexico, which has been developing its policy for over 20 years, is now home to 700,000 pensioners from the United States who are living in Mexican retirement communities.

Its other rival is Panama, which has been advancing in this direction for about a decade. Panama has five retirement communities at present, with another 42 currently being licensed and built.

But the government authorities are optimistic. The climate, enormous biodiversity, security, stability, and polls describing Costa Rica as "the happiest country in the world," are factors that will work in its favour, according to Woodbridge.

Costa Rica's reputation as "the Switzerland of Central America" will also help.

Not everyone is in favour of the creation of this new market, however. "It will affect the rights of the people of Costa Rica," said Carlos Páez with the National Union of Social Security Fund Employees (UNDECA).

Páez said "if this is put into practice, doctors and nurses will go into private medicine," which could bring about a crisis in the Costa Rican public health system, presently stretched to the limit. "There is already a lack of specialists and health personnel," and the flight of these workers to private clinics and hospitals will only increase the shortage, said the UNDECA trade unionist.

"The first thing the country should do is to solve the crisis in the social security fund, before opening the market to additional demands," Páez argued.

Every day, some 6,000 people reach the age of 65 in the United States. The baby boomer generation, born between 1945 and 1964, controls 77 percent of the available financial resources of that country.

Forty-six million people in the United States have no medical insurance, a fact that Costa Rica plans to use to attract U.S. older adults to its shores. (END)

Papagayo winds

Summer in Costa Rica is glorious! After the rainy season months of storms and mud, the skies clear up and the sun shines intensely...for the next several months! While it usually takes a few weeks for the ocean to clear up from all the runoff caused by the rain, when it does the clear blue Pacific beckons you. The one aspect of the hot, dry Guanacaste summer that can at times be brutal is the Papagayo wind.

If you've spent any length of time in Guanacaste during January, February or March, you know this phenomenon. The wind can howl for days on end, gusting at speeds that rival a hurricane. The ocean temperature drops and whitecaps can be seen on the waves for miles around. In short, it is weather that can keep you inside even on the sunniest of days!

In Central America in the summer, these gale-force winds from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea funnel through narrow breaks in the Cordillera mountains and across the lakes of Nicaragua. The wind mixes the normally-warm surface waters with colder, nutrient-rich water that lies beneath the thermocline near the coast. While the winds may keep you out of the ocean for a few days, they actually create an algae bloom on which an entire food chain depends.

The weather behind the Papagayo wind is explained by NASA: "The meteorlogical mechanism that causes Papagayo winds is relatively simple. In winter, cold high-pressure weather systems move southward from North America over the Gulf of Mexico. These high-pressure systems create strong pressure gradients between the atmostphere over the Gulf of Mexico and the warmer, moister atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. Just as a river flows from high elevations to lower elevations, the air in the high-pressure system will "flow" downhill toward lower pressure, but the Cordillera mountains block the flow of air, channeling it through Chivela Pass in Mexico, the lake district of Nicaragua, and also Gaillard Cut in Panama (which also holds the Panama Canal)."

So the next time you hear of a "snowpocalypse" in the states while visiting here, brace yourself because the Papagayo winds will be howling soon!

Asking for Directions in Costa Rica

Gringo Pinto