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Fishermen on
Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast Embrace
Ecotourism
Young men on the Osa Peninsula and in
Golfito, on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific
coast, are slowly shifting from traditional
fishing activities to exploring the
opportunities offered by ecotourism, thanks
to a project sponsored by the Neotropica
Foundation.
The program consists in giving classes to
students between 17 and 32 so “they can
become tourist guides, but can also start
their own businesses,” the project’s
training coordinator, Sebastian Salazar,
told EFE.
“The idea is to educate these young people
and give them the tools to develop and offer
high-quality activities to tourists who come
to the area,” Salazar said.
The course “has given special attention to
ethical questions, as well as to the
preservation of the environment,” Salazar
said.
For the coordinator, “the main thing is that
young people acquire knowledge about the
environment, the countryside, the trees and
in that way become leaders in the area,
compiling information, designing tours and
pointing out places and points of interest.”
Salazar said that the project intends to go
even further, “and besides continuing with
the guide courses for new students, we also
want to offer graduates concrete training so
they can specialize, for example, in birds,
popular culture or archaeology.”
One of the students, Doni Chavez, said that
the course has given them the chance to “get
in contact with organizations of the region,
as well as establish a communications
network among the participants” so they can
help each other out in the future.
The executive director of the Neotropica
Foundation, Bernardo Aguilar, told Efe that
the program seeks “to provide opportunities
for the inhabitants of the region so they
don’t have to move somewhere else.”
“Some 220,000 Costa Rican immigrants live in
the United States, of whom almost 60 percent
are on the southern Pacific coast,” Aguilar
said.
This is one of the poorest regions in the
country, since for decades its main activity
was banana growing, but when the
multinational Standard Fruit Company left in
1985, the locals had to find new sources of
income, chiefly from non-industrial fishing.
“The idea is to offer life plans for young
people of the area, so they can see the
advantages of acquiring knowledge and can
set up their own companies based on
ecotourism,” Aguilar said.
“So the idea is to offer a stable economic
base for the region,” Aguilar said.
The program has already graduated its first
20 local guides, but expects to have many
more for next year.
Of the 2.1 million tourists who visited
Costa Rica in 2008, according to foundation
estimates, some 40,000 went to the area of
the Osa Peninsula, particularly attracted by
the natural richness of the area, and to
Corcovado National Park, which contains 2.5
percent of the world’s biodiversity.
The Neotropica Foundation, a
non-governmental organization, was founded
in 1985 in Costa Rica with the intention of
finding a balance between people’s
well-being and nature conservation, while
researching and promoting the sustainable
use of natural resources. EFE
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