Congressmen Target Nicoya Gulf Islands for Development
By Rod Hughes from news reports
At least 17 Legislative Assembly deputies are backing a bill to grant several hotel concessions in the mostly uninhabited Gulf of Nicoya islands but some critics worry that lack of water, sewage treatment and trash disposal may result in chaos and failure, reported Costa Rica’s leading daily, La Nacion.
The Gulf is bounded on the west by the Nicoya Peninsula and on the east by the country’s coastline including the port city of Puntarenas. One of the small islands that dot the Gulf, Tortugas Island, is already popular with tourists, visited by an average of 150 excursionists per day during the high season. It is a idllic place, white sand beach giving way to palm trees and a dry forest inland on the hills rising in the middle of the isle as if designed by a Hollywood set artist as a tropical paradise. It serves several carefully selected one-day excursion boats including, for decades, the prestigious Calypso Cruises.
But the influx is carefully controlled and the permits to use the island to land tourists is subject to cancellation. Solid trash (plastic containers, wrappers, and uneaten food) is carefully collected by the tour boats and carried back on the return voyage to Puntarenas, while restrooms are of the portable variety used on construction sites so sewage also leaves the island. The daily paper estimates that, if a hotel were built there, the isle could only support a 20-room hostelry due to lack of potable water.
For now, the pelicans and other shore birds are mostly free of human noise and interference with only excursion and fishing boats to disturb their wheeling.