Postcard from Costa Rica: prison island to national park

“My neighbour was a prisoner here. The stories he tells . . . ” A tourist who had just introduced himself as Alfonso winced and shook his left hand as though it was covered in something disgusting. I asked what the neighbour had done to be sent to this old penitentiary on San Lucas Island in the west of Costa Rica.

“He was innocent! They all were!” Alfonso laughed at his own half-joke, then stalled and restarted with a different tone. “Actually, I haven’t found a way to ask him yet.”

The prison was built a few years before Costa Rica became one of the world’s first nations to abolish the death penalty, in 1877. Some former prisoners, including the author José León Sánchez, theorise that the two events were linked — an almost unimaginably hostile prison replacing capital punishment. It was shuttered in 1991, abandoned for a decade, then declared a wildlife refuge. In August 2020, this status was upgraded to make San Lucas Island Costa Rica’s 30th, and newest, national park.

Flora and fauna have mostly been in charge for the past three decades, though they do little to soften the island’s haunting atmosphere. When I visited, piratical frigate birds and gluttonous pelicans were the only things guarding the shore; deeper inland I heard the dreadful calls of howler monkeys swirling through the foliage, and each time park rangers led me into an old cell, I was met with startling tornadoes of bats. Even knowing I could simply walk out again, the claustrophobia felt nightmarish.

“Yes, but I don’t see it as a sad place,” said Olger Núñez Jiménez, the park’s administrator and head ranger, when I stepped ashore that morning. “It’s more than that.” We were talking just past the barnacle-coated stairs of the prison’s original dock, next to a path known as the Street of Bitterness, the miserable route new prisoners would have trudged to their cells.

Jiménez, 44, has spent the past decade working on the island. His knowledge on everything from individual prisoners to plant life is broad and deep. He also sees a greater significance in San Lucas’s preservation. “It’s a place that lets you think two things: about all that has happened and that a new history can be built,” he said. “Instead of being sad, it’s a place that allows reflection.”

If little San Lucas Island — less than two square miles — offers perspective and the prospect of renewal for Costa Ricans, perhaps the whole country does something similar for foreigners. Its environmental turnround is often hailed as a model. In the 1970s it was among the world’s most rapidly deforesting countries and, by 1985, official estimates for the amount of land still covered by forest ranged from 24 to 30 per cent.

But new protective legislation in the 1990s, and a policy of paying land owners to conserve trees and plant new ones, funded in part by taxes on fossil fuels, brought about a dramatic reversal: by the 2010s, forest cover was back to more than 50 per cent. Thriving flora and fauna prompted a boom in eco-tourism (arrivals rose from 1.1mn in 2002 to 3.1mn in 2019), which played a key role in the new green economic model.

The bad guys don’t like tourists in the forests

The pandemic underlined tourism’s virtuous role still further. As visitor numbers collapsed, unemployment rose, at one point reaching 24 per cent, and there were cuts to the number of guards and rangers in protected areas. Both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts saw a rise in the poaching of sea turtle eggs.

“The bad guys don’t like tourists in the forests,” said Jürgen Stein, owner of the Selva Bananito ecolodge, candlelight flickering in his eyes as we spoke in the lodge’s rudimentary bar. I’d come to spend a couple of days at the lodge, close to the Panamanian border, after leaving San Lucas. “When we’ve got people out on the trails or sleeping in the jungle, they can’t come, but during the pandemic we were operating at around 10 or 12 per cent capacity. In the past it was 65 per cent.” The jobs of two forest rangers, financed by the tourists, had had to be cut, he said.

The good news for Stein and the hundreds like him is that the tourism recovery has been rapid: by May arrivals by air were up to within 2.5 per cent of the same month in 2019.

In the morning, Stein took me up in his gyrocopter, which he uses to show off the area to tourists and to try to spot any illegal logging or poaching. He told me that, a couple of years previously, he’d taken the country’s environment minister up and spotted some suspicious vehicles. When they landed, calls were made and, a couple of hours later, a gang of criminal loggers had been arrested.

We saw no such drama. Instead, we swooped through a canyon and out over the canopy, above black vultures and great egrets gliding on thermals. On one side the sun glittered on the surface of the Caribbean, on the other unbroken forest stretched to the horizon.

Mid-air, Stein seemed in a reflective mood. “All of this land was owned by my father,” he said through the headset, explaining that his father had begun to log his 700 hectares until his children persuaded him to stop. “My sisters and I begged him to reconsider. Can you imagine what we would have lost?”

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