Cureña

About Cureña:

The district covers about 369 square kilometres between La Virgen to the south, Puerto Viejo to the east and the canton of San Carlos, in Alajuela, to the west. Its head town is Golfito, a small village with no link to the port of the same name on the southern Pacific coast. From Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí it is 33 kilometres, around an hour, heading north through Arrepentidos, Boca Río Sucio, Ahogados, Sardinal and Santa Delia; much of the way is paved, the last stretch is gravel. Just past the bridge over the Río Toro the road splits, left for Golfito and right for La Unión del Toro and on to Los Ángeles on the Sarapiquí. From the San Carlos side there are ways in from Pital and from Río Cuarto through Pangola. Public transport is thin: as of 2023 a single bus ran on Mondays and Thursdays from Tambor to Puerto Viejo.

Cureña became a district in October 1999, one of the last created in the province. Until then the area had no electricity, no public phones and no road anyone would call one. The bridge over the Río Toro at paso Cipriano, built in 1999 and 2000, opened the first route a car could take to Puerto Viejo, and power lines followed in 2003. Before that, reaching the canton seat meant crossing the Sarapiquí on makeshift bridges such as the hammock bridge between Golfito and Pangola, or driving a loop of around 105 kilometres through Pital, Aguas Zarcas, Río Cuarto and La Virgen. The living still comes from the land: banana, pineapple, cassava and plantain, beef cattle, and on smaller farms dual-purpose dairy and cheese-making. Some owners have planted melina for timber and graze cattle under it, and payments for environmental services bring in money for forest left standing.

This is low, hot country, mostly flat and full of water. Caños and small lagoons, some permanent and some only in the wet months, run across the farms towards the San Juan. The Lagunas de La Marina, around 115 hectares of open water that has been there since 1972, feed the Caño Dos Bocas and the Colpachí river, and the track out to them needs a high 4×4, with loose rock and red mud. Part of the district lies inside the Maquenque mixed national wildlife refuge, created in 2005 partly from the old Cureña forest reserve, with wetlands at Tambor and Colpachí and nesting country for the great green macaw. The weather matters here through the roads: red mud and rising caños decide whether a finca can be reached in an ordinary car or only in four-wheel drive.

Around 1,500 people live in Cureña now, up from 951 in 2011 and 759 in 2000. They are spread between Golfito and villages such as Tierrabuena, Trinidad, La Unión del Toro and Vuelta Cabo de Hornos, and, on the San Juan itself, Tambor, Copalchí, Remolinito and Paloseco, also known as Boca Cureña. In the river villages boats tie up at small landings, and the bank opposite is Nicaraguan. Buyers tend to be cattle and crop farmers adding to their holdings, people buying forest to keep it, and families after a quiet country place on flat land with a stream running through.

Farms and Ranches in Cureña:

Most land here sells by the hectare. A typical large offer is a mixed cattle-and-crop finca of 1,000 hectares, roughly a quarter pasture, close to half scrub and the rest forest, with about 200 square metres of buildings, internal tracks and tributaries of the Toro and the Sarapiquí near its edges. Other fincas for sale in Cureña sit around Golfito itself, on the roads out towards Pangola and La Unión del Toro. Look hardest at the scrub. Whether regrown charral now counts legally as forest depends on how old and how closed it is, and that decides whether it can go back to pasture or has to stay standing. When an offer says the boundary lines need clearing, take it literally and budget the time and the machete work before you rely on the stated area.

Land and Lots in Cureña:

Smaller parcels exist, though small here means a few hectares. One at Río Frío runs to just under three hectares, completely flat, with 83 metres of frontage on a public road, planted with orange, coconut and soursop and crossed by a small stream. That is the kind of land people buy for a weekend house and some fruit trees, or as a base for a few head of cattle. Before you draw up a house, ask how the power line would reach the parcel and where the water would come from. In a district that only got electricity in 2003, neither is a given.

FAQ:

• Can I buy land right on the San Juan river?

  Not outright. A strip two kilometres wide along the border with Nicaragua belongs to the State and cannot be bought or titled privately, and Tambor, Copalchí, Remolinito and Paloseco all sit inside it. Families there live on and farm that land, and the State has been working on a concession scheme to give them a formal right to use it. If an offer lies within two kilometres of the river you will not be getting a registered title, so have a lawyer explain exactly what right is being transferred.

• How long does it take to get to Cureña?

  About an hour from Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí and around three hours from Heredia city, a trip of some 113 kilometres. The final kilometres are gravel, and the tracks to the lagoons and the river villages are four-wheel-drive country, rocky and slick with red mud after rain. Coming from San Carlos, the roads up from Pital, or from Río Cuarto through Pangola, reach Golfito from the west.

• What should I check before buying a finca in Cureña?

  Start with the map, not the house. Find out whether the parcel falls inside the Maquenque refuge, where any building has to follow the refuge management plan, and whether any part of it lies within the two-kilometre border strip. Then confirm the title and the plano catastrado with the Registro Nacional (Registro Inmobiliario), ask the Municipalidad de Sarapiquí for a certificado de uso de suelo, and have a surveyor find the corner markers, which on big fincas are easily lost in the scrub. Ask the neighbours how the road held up in the last heavy rains and whether the caños on the property burst their banks.

• What services are there?

  Golfito has the church and the Liceo Golfito de Cureña, a secondary school that opened in 2005 with eleven students and had 67 in 2025. Tambor, Copalchí, Remolinito and Boca Cureña have each had a small primary school, several of them run by a single teacher. The municipality, the bus terminal and the public health area are in Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí.

• Is this the same Golfito as the port in the south?

  No. This Golfito is the head town of Cureña, in Heredia, close to the northern border; the port town of Golfito is in Puntarenas, at the other end of the country. Use the full address, Golfito, Cureña, Sarapiquí, Heredia, on every document so nobody mixes the two up.