There’s something extraordinary about a Nosara sunset. It’s not just the beautiful light and color emanating from the darkening sky. It’s more – the surfers looking for that last wave before daylight slips away, the kids running in and out of the sea, the dogs playing in the sand, and the rest of us, watching, preferably with a cerveza or margarita in hand.
I didn’t know much about Nosara before my daughter, Emily, and I arrived there. All I knew is that this Costa Rican town is located on the country’s Pacific coast, south of Tamarindo, a kind of bigger sister, hippy-filled surf town.
It didn’t take long for us to discover that similarly, Nosara is basically all about surfing and yoga. The main beach in town, Playa Guiones, is part of a National Wildlife Refuge, and much of Nosara’s beauty is sustained because of the efforts of both locals and the expat community whose environmental campaigns have successfully warded off development that would affect the beaches.
To get to Nosara, we flew into Liberia and after a couple of hours drive arrived at our destination, Tierra Magnifica, a privately-run ten room boutique hotel perched on a hill overlooking the beach a few miles below. Affiliated with Activated Life Experiences, an adventure outfitter specializing in nature based activities in Costa Rica, the staff at TM arranged for Emily and I to have a surf lesson at the Nosara Tico Surf School, go on a thrilling zip-line tour with Miss Sky Canopy Tour, and visit a local family-owned farm and home. To get to the farm, we drove about 30 minutes and were met by a farmer along a river bed. Each one of us was assigned a horse and we rode along a river and through the forest, eventually making our way to the farm where we toured the crops, and ate a traditional homemade lunch of chicken, rice and beans.
In addition to its great surf, Nosara is well known as a haven for yogis. Open in 1994 by the former director of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Lenox, Massachussetts, the Nosara Yoga Institute offers teacher training to yogis from around the world. At Tierra Magnifica (TM), we took a yoga class given by a local teacher in the hotel’s open air yoga gazebo. The view and surrounding nature only added to the zen experience.
When we weren’t eating homemade meals or munching on afternoon guacamole and chips al fresco at TM – much of the beautiful wooden outdoor furniture is imported from Bali – we ventured to beachside restaurants like La Luna on Playa Pelada. Sipping cocktails at one of the outdoor tables with the setting sun and rolling waves just steps away is hard to beat. And from where you’ll watch the sun set is probably the toughest decision you’ll have to make in Nosara. Pura Vida.
