Set amid the dry tropical forest of Costa Rica’s Papagayo Peninsula, the eco-resort of Kasiiya offers a full sensory reboot, with a little help from nature and a resident healer...
A rope bridge took me to the healer Yamuna’s stilt hut. As I stepped carefully across, he sounded the conch shell of welcome from a deck suspended in a canopy of vulnerable hardwoods common to north-western Costa Rica. It was clear that something special was about to happen.
Yamuna’s sanctuary of crystals, vibrating gongs, cleansing incenses and health-giving indigenous herbal essences is the heartbeat of Kasiiya, the wild card on the Gulf of Papagayo. The region is better known for it’s manicured resorts and sealed-off tourist compounds boasting rosters of scheduled activities and programmed ‘fun’. What this private and low-key eco-hideaway offers instead is a rare sense of space, set deep in one of the country’s last remaining tropical dry forest wildernesses, a landscape that once covered much of the Americas.
Spectacular views from Kasiiya (© Pucci)
Here I’d been promised the chance to discover the natural world at my own pace, or under the tutelage of a personal nature guide. With only nine tented ‘lodges’, camouflaged among 50 untamed hectares, the coral blossom of the native poro and toot of the yellow trumpet flowers of the Cortez tree offered up the only shouty notes. Even the drive from Liberia airport set a serene tone as we crossed the last hard dirt track of a headland that offered glimpses of immaculate beaches, over which swooped squadrons of dark frigatebirds and pelicans. It was all the fanfare I required.
What followed was a slow and precious decompression against the soundtrack of nature. The boom of the surf, the barking of the howler monkeys, the chattering of the green parrots – these sounds and colours all became more intense after a session with Kasiiya’s healer, when the scales seemed to fall from my eyes. The reawakening of the inner self, Yamuna told me, can be magical and emotional for many guests. Celebrities such as Morgan Freeman, Catherine Zeta Jones and Brad Pitt, who habitually live their lives in the public eye, have all visited here before.
Aerial shot of Kasiiya (© Pucci)
The interior of Kasiiya's tented lodges(© Pucci)
Being outdoors and close to nature is how we want to travel now. It’s a universal yearning made more urgent by the pandemic. And this re-imagined idea of luxury finds its perfect expression at a resort that has been conceived to allow nature to take centre stage. There were no distractions, no chlorinated swimming pools, no concrete or plastic, no motorised watercraft, no bar music and no wasteful menus offering endless choices, just a selection of dishes of the day headlining raw or fire-cooked food.
There was always a cool box for my veranda where I could while away the hours watching crested iguana doing press-ups in the sun. Below, the pristine beach beckoned like a blank canvas onto which a story was waiting to be painted. It could have been anything from the lumbering visitation of an Olive Ridley turtle at daybreak, leaving snail trails as it laid its eggs in the dune, to an osprey snatching a tuna from the waves. The possibilities were endless. This was Costa Rica in microcosm, a place unlike any other, where the vivid unforgettable biodiversity of the country played out.
Booking information: Rates from £680 per night; kasiiya.com. Or for more information, visit Cazenove+Loyd at cazloyd.com
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