Hotel Aguas Claras

Among the gardens of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, Hotel Aguas Claras is a boutique collection of ten restored 1940s wooden houses — painted in the Caribbean colour tradition of cream, turquoise, and yellow — arranged through a garden of heliconias, palms, and flowering vines at the edge of one of the most culturally distinctive communities in Central America. Puerto Viejo’s character is shaped by the Afro-Caribbean community whose ancestors arrived as workers on the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company and whose culinary, musical, and social traditions give this coast a feel entirely different from Pacific Costa Rica — calypso music, run-down coconut fish stew, and the particular social ease of a community that has largely preserved its culture despite the pressures of tourism development. The Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, protecting one of the last intact Caribbean rainforest-to-reef ecosystems in Central America, is immediately adjacent.

The restaurant focuses on the Afro-Caribbean culinary traditions of the Puerto Viejo community, with coconut rice, jerk-spiced meats, and the extraordinary reef fish available from local fishermen who work the protected reefs of the Gandoca-Manzanillo corridor. Snorkelling on the coral gardens of Punta Uva, guided walks in the wildlife refuge, visits to the Jaguar Rescue Center, and cycling through the Caribbean coastal forest are among the activities most relevant to this part of Costa Rica. The hotel’s connections with the local community run deeper than the usual resort partnerships.

Aguas Claras’s commitment to the Puerto Viejo community is expressed through its employment of local staff, its sourcing from local fishermen and farmers, and its support for the cultural events and community organisations that maintain the Afro-Caribbean heritage of this coast in the face of considerable commercial pressure to genericise it for tourism.