Soaring investment in Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast

Costa Rica’s central Pacific belt –home of the country’s most sought-after national park- is having a ball as far as tourist investment is concerned. The attractive zone dotted with beaches and mountains has lured both local and foreign entrepreneurs alike who’ve come with a variety of hotel projects of all sizes in their briefcases.

According to local weekly The Financier, only between the Manuel Antonio Park and the location of Quepos –the two of them are some 45 miles southwest of the nation’s capital- there are 3,500 rooms for tourists.

Almost half that number of rooms was opened in recent years and there are other plans in store to build not only new lodging facilities on the premises, but also a yacht marina and a jetty.

Only last year, the location’s municipality doled out permits to build hotels and cabanas for as many as $8.5 million.

The offer now reaches out to real estate companies that either lease or sell those deluxe properties to foreign retirees willing to find the perfect oceanfront getaway to spend the rest of their lives in.

Jeremy Clyce, from Century 21 Co., told The Financier that a one-week rent in one of those houses will be in the neighborhood of $5,000.

So much development in a region that once relied exclusively on farming in the past stems mostly from the eye-opening beauty of its beaches, especially those within the boundaries of the Manuel Antonio Park.

Every year since its grand opening in 1972, this small-scale 682-acre paradise is visited by roughly 145,000 tourists and generates an average $488,000 worth of annual revenues.

Those earnings are set aside to pay overdue money to owners of 42 percent of private lands inside the park.