These Gardens Started When Travel Slowed. Now, They’re Spurring Tourism.

When COVID caused a shutdown of travel to Costa Rica, many in the tourism sector found themselves out of work, and a local non-profit helped them turn to farming to fill the gaps. Now, those successful farms are stimulating tourism in the country.

Immaculately tilled rows, prodigiously verdant leafy greens, towering tomato plants, sprawling zucchini and three more plots of radishes and peppers. It’s called la huerta, the garden, but the humble name doesn’t capture the majesty or size. No, this garden in Triunfo, Costa Rica is no pandemic plot of veggies or a common backyard patch of corn and green beans. This is a farm, an enterprise. It started when the pandemic-induced moratorium on tourism forced many in Costa Rica to turn to agriculture, and now, in an almost ironic turn of events, it’s funded by and encouraging tourism. 

Perhaps even more unbelievable than the state of the massive garden are the women tending to it. With wide smiles, they don wide-brimmed hats and rubber boots covered in mud, holding fistfuls of dirt-encrusted squash blossoms. A year ago, they hadn’t planted or harvested a day in their lives; now, thanks to Creciendo Juntos, Peninsula Papagayo’s non-profit arm, these women till the soil, grow good things and find joy in working with their hands. More importantly, they also feed their families and make a living, something that, in 2020, many of their peers worried they wouldn’t be able to do.