Playas del Coco

El Coco began about 150 years ago, when its first settlers came to dive for pearls and to fish from small boats; logging was another early livelihood. It was already a holiday place by the 1930s, when Costa Rican families travelled to the Guanacaste coast on horseback, a time remembered in a song by the Guanacaste composer Héctor Zúñiga Rovira. A wider expansion of tourism came from the 1960s, when local people offered simple services — cabins, campsites and sodas serving typical food.

The hotelier Claudio Rojas, who moved to the coast in the late 1950s, built one of the first tourist complexes, which grew to include cabins, a pier and a restaurant, and other local promoters helped the growth of the government's Gulf of Papagayo tourism project, which began in 1972. Foreign visitors and residents began arriving in numbers in the 1990s, and from 1995 the airport near Liberia gave the town a strong push. Between 2006 and 2007 property companies accelerated the building of residential developments and condominiums on the hills around the bay.

In 2008 the municipality of Carrillo began clearing illegal buildings from the 50-metre public zone along the beach, and from 2011 a project to give the town a new face built a seafront promenade named Amor de Temporada. Streets have since been paved, pavements built, and policing and beach cleaning improved through a partnership of residents, volunteers, investors and the local council.

Playas del Coco has long been a place where Costa Ricans go on holiday as well as foreigners. It is the fastest-growing tourist area on the Gulf of Papagayo and one of the most popular holiday destinations for Costa Rican and foreign visitors alike. It began as a small resort for Costa Ricans and was transformed by the growth of international tourism.

The sea is central to local identity. The celebration of the Virgen del Mar, a story of local sailors lost at sea, was born in Playas del Coco, although it is now most closely associated with Puntarenas, which adopted it. The town's seafront promenade takes its name, Amor de Temporada, from a popular traditional Costa Rican song by the Guanacaste composer Héctor Zúñiga.

Today the town mixes Guanacaste ways with an international beach culture. English is almost the dominant language in the tourist areas, and the bars, casinos and nightclubs of the centre stay busy after dark.

Playas del Coco is a community in the district of Sardinal, in the canton of Carrillo; no separate population figure is published for the town itself. Sardinal district as a whole had about 14,900 people at the 2011 census and an estimated 21,100 in 2022; its villages include Coco, Ocotal, Playa Hermosa and many inland settlements.

Tourism is the main activity, chiefly adventure tourism and hotels, along with residential tourism: condominiums and houses occupied all year or for a large part of it by foreign owners. The town has a wide choice of hotels and restaurants, supermarkets, banks, a harbour master's office, medical centres and a post office. The geography divides it clearly: condominiums and holiday homes on the small hills, and local workers' homes in the low-lying parts of town.

The day follows the sea and the heat. Dive and fishing boats leave early, the beach and the promenade fill in the late afternoon, and the town comes alive after dark, when locals and visitors gather along the seafront and the main street.

The sea sets the menu. Fresh fish is cooked whole and fried with patacones, the flattened, twice-fried plantain slices, or cut into ceviche, raw fish marinated in lime with onion and coriander, and seafood fills the menus of the town's restaurants. Seafood places sit alongside international restaurants aimed at the many foreign residents and visitors, and well-stocked supermarkets supply those cooking for themselves in rented condominiums.

The town's first restaurants were its sodas, the small diners serving typical Costa Rican food, and they still feed local workers: gallo pinto, rice and beans fried together, at breakfast, and the casado at lunch, a plate of rice, beans, salad, fried plantain and a piece of meat or fish.

Guanacaste's maize traditions reach the coast too, in hand-made tortillas, tamales and rosquillas, crunchy rings of corn dough. Frescos, drinks of fresh fruit blended with water or milk, are found at sodas and restaurants alike.