Why we chose Costa Rica
Written by Colin, February 2025
Why not stay where we were?
We met outside Eugene, Oregon, where I had been living in an intentional community since 2010. Tiffany was new to the area and had very little attachment to it. So in becoming life partners we didn’t assume we would stay there or anywhere nearby. Everywhere was a possibility.
A major factor in deciding where to live was fires. Across the whole Western U.S. wildfires have become more common and more unpredictable in recent years. Tiffany was very concerned about this, and was even evacuated for many weeks during her first fire season in Oregon due to one just a mile down the road.
Comparing places in the U.S.
Using my left-brain experience, I created a spreadsheet to help us evaluate exactly what we wanted in a home locale. We weighed about 50 factors, like how the government responded to COVID, the cost of property, and the ease of running a retreat business there. This was a qualitative way to compare regions and specific properties to each other.
We decided to take some trips to scout out other spots that might work well for us. We took a road trip to Idaho and bits of Montana and Wyoming, having heard about the live-and-let-live attitude of Idaho. It was a pretty place with great natural spots, but still in the band of fire danger, either itself or downwind of fires in the Northwest. So that place wasn’t a winner.
We then went to Austin, Texas, having heard about the culture developing there. We tasted it for a week, and found that it does indeed seem to be the coolest place in Texas. But that doesn’t say much - it is still flat, hot, dry, has almost no food production, and is disappointingly mainstream. Thumbs-down.
Open to being outside the States
Tiffany is a very skilled prowler of the Web, and heard about an area of Mexico where a lot of people from the U.S. are moving to, particularly black Americans. That place (Mérida) and the neighboring state of Campeche are also considered to be the safest places in a country riddled with cartel/government violence. This was the first time we tuned in to possibilities outside the U.S., which was an important step in our search. We made a visit there. It was a stultifyingly hot area, also flat and dry. But it had a lot going for it too, and it did surprisingly well compared to our criteria. Mexico in general feels threatening and unstable, though.
Having opened ourselves to international locales, we considered other countries. We wanted to be no further from family in Southern California than an equivalent plane flight to the East Coast or Hawaii. That meant Panama or closer. Tiffany looked into various countries in Central America, especially around how restrictive they were during the COVID excitement. I checked out Freedom House to get a sense of openness of the societies. We researched natural disasters in the places, and watched YouTubers recite what they like and don’t like about different countries.
Costa Rica?
Until then we both had poo-pooed Costa Rica as an option, because it’s kind of the standard one - everyone moves to CR and it’s unoriginal. But upon looking into it more, it was clear why - for example having no military for the last 70+ years. Also ranking higher than the U.S. in freedom (which I find to be true - you can do more of what you want here) and having few dangers. I’d been here once briefly as an eco-tourist, and loved the people - the most friendly and helpful of the 40 countries I’d been to. But that was the sum of our experience, so we decided to take a scouting trip.
We visited for three weeks, and got a good taste of various places in the country. Namely popular ones with foreigners like La Fortuna, Tamarindo, Uvita, and Rivas. That trip confirmed the arrows pointing toward Costa Rica, so we decided to move here. Friendly people, natural features like waterfalls and beaches and mountains, lush greenness everywhere, few barriers to life, occasional English, and cheaper land and labor than in the U.S. Plus a general feel of pura vida, which is not just marketing for foreigners to buy T-shirts and stuffed sloths, but is a real thing, and lived out through the patience and well-adjustedness of almost all ticos. These are the reasons we chose Costa Rica. As far as San Vito and our property, the reasons for that are shared throughout this website.
