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Postcard from Costa Rica: jail island to nationwide park

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“My neighbour was a prisoner right here. The tales he tells . . . ” A vacationer who had simply launched himself as Alfonso winced and shook his left hand as if it was coated in one thing disgusting. I requested what the neighbour had completed to be despatched to this previous penitentiary on San Lucas Island within the west of Costa Rica.

“He was harmless! All of them have been!” Alfonso laughed at his personal half-joke, then stalled and restarted with a distinct tone. “Really, I haven’t discovered a approach to ask him but.”

The jail was constructed just a few years earlier than Costa Rica grew to become one of many world’s first nations to abolish the dying penalty, in 1877. Some former prisoners, together with the creator José León Sánchez, theorise that the 2 occasions have been linked — an virtually unimaginably hostile jail changing capital punishment. It was shuttered in 1991, deserted for a decade, then declared a wildlife refuge. In August 2020, this standing was upgraded to make San Lucas Island Costa Rica’s thirtieth, and latest, nationwide park.

A bearded man in a khaki uniform gesticulates in an abandoned courtyard
Olger Núñez Jiménez in San Lucas Island Nationwide Park © Jamie Lafferty
A tangle of air roots spreads across a wall and window
Crops take over the long-abandoned jail buildings on San Lucas © Jamie Lafferty

Wildlife have largely been in cost for the previous three a long time, although they do little to melt the island’s haunting environment. After I visited, piratical frigate birds and gluttonous pelicans have been the one issues guarding the shore; deeper inland I heard the dreadful calls of howler monkeys swirling by the foliage, and every time park rangers led me into an previous cell, I used to be met with startling tornadoes of bats. Even understanding I might merely stroll out once more, the claustrophobia felt nightmarish.

Map showing Costa Rica, including Selva Bananito ecolodge, San Lucas Island, and the capital San Jose

“Sure, however I don’t see it as a tragic place,” mentioned Olger Núñez Jiménez, the park’s administrator and head ranger, after I stepped ashore that morning. “It’s greater than that.” We have been speaking simply previous the barnacle-coated stairs of the jail’s unique dock, subsequent to a path often known as the Road of Bitterness, the depressing route new prisoners would have trudged to their cells.

Jiménez, 44, has spent the previous decade engaged on the island. His information on all the things from particular person prisoners to plants is broad and deep. He additionally sees a better significance in San Lucas’s preservation. “It’s a spot that permits you to suppose two issues: about all that has occurred and {that a} new historical past may be constructed,” he mentioned. “As a substitute of being unhappy, it’s a spot that permits reflection.”

Clouds rise above dense foliage
Morning mist clears by the jungle at Selva Bananito © Jamie Lafferty
A red spiky fruit is cut in half to show round red berries inside
Fruit from the lipstick tree, or achiote, generally discovered on the Caribbean aspect of Costa Rica © Jamie Lafferty

If little San Lucas Island — lower than two sq. miles — provides perspective and the prospect of renewal for Costa Ricans, maybe the entire nation does one thing comparable for foreigners. Its environmental turnround is usually hailed as a mannequin. Within the Nineteen Seventies it was among the many world’s most quickly deforesting international locations and, by 1985, official estimates for the quantity of land nonetheless coated by forest ranged from 24 to 30 per cent.

However new protecting laws within the Nineteen Nineties, and a coverage of paying land homeowners to preserve timber and plant new ones, funded partly by taxes on fossil fuels, caused a dramatic reversal: by the 2010s, forest cowl was again to greater than 50 per cent. Thriving wildlife prompted a increase in eco-tourism (arrivals rose from 1.1mn in 2002 to three.1mn in 2019), which performed a key position within the new inexperienced financial mannequin.

The pandemic underlined tourism’s virtuous position nonetheless additional. As customer numbers collapsed, unemployment rose, at one level reaching 24 per cent, and there have been cuts to the variety of guards and rangers in protected areas. Each the Caribbean and Pacific coasts noticed an increase within the poaching of sea turtle eggs.

“The unhealthy guys don’t like vacationers within the forests,” mentioned Jürgen Stein, proprietor of the Selva Bananito ecolodge, candlelight flickering in his eyes as we spoke within the lodge’s rudimentary bar. I’d come to spend a few days on the lodge, near the Panamanian border, after leaving San Lucas. “Once we’ve received individuals out on the paths or sleeping within the jungle, they’ll’t come, however in the course of the pandemic we have been working at round 10 or 12 per cent capability. Previously it was 65 per cent.” The roles of two forest rangers, financed by the vacationers, had needed to be lower, he mentioned.

The excellent news for Stein and the a whole bunch like him is that the tourism restoration has been fast: by Could arrivals by air have been as much as inside 2.5 per cent of the identical month in 2019.

A man wearing a headset flies over undulating jungle
Jürgen Stein pilots his gyrocopter over his household’s now-protected land © Jamie Lafferty

Within the morning, Stein took me up in his gyrocopter, which he makes use of to indicate off the realm to vacationers and to attempt to spot any unlawful logging or poaching. He instructed me that, a few years beforehand, he’d taken the nation’s surroundings minister up and noticed some suspicious autos. Once they landed, calls have been made and, a few hours later, a gang of prison loggers had been arrested.

We noticed no such drama. As a substitute, we swooped by a canyon and out over the cover, above black vultures and nice egrets gliding on thermals. On one aspect the solar glittered on the floor of the Caribbean, on the opposite unbroken forest stretched to the horizon.

Mid-air, Stein appeared in a reflective temper. “All of this land was owned by my father,” he mentioned by the headset, explaining that his father had begun to log his 700 hectares till his youngsters persuaded him to cease. “My sisters and I begged him to rethink. Are you able to think about what we’d have misplaced?”

Particulars

Jamie Lafferty was a visitor of Journey Latin America (journeylatinamerica.co.uk); it provides an 11-day vacation to Costa Rica visiting San José, Arenal, Monteverde, San Lucas Island and the Nicoya Peninsula ranging from £3,980, together with flights from the UK, transfers, lodging, and most meals

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