International Living Back to Touting Costa Rica

A well-known publication for expatriates that had stopped promoting Costa Rica as a place to retire is once again advising its readers to go Tico.

International Living magazine, widely recognized as having been at the vanguard of the first wave of foreigners moving to Costa Rica in the 1980s, stopped promoting the country as an inexpensive place to live in 1992.

But Costa Rica came back to the magazine’s pages a year and a half ago, and this week International Living held a seminar for foreigners considering moving their lives to Costa Rica.

“For the first time in 15 years, it finally makes sense again to consider Costa Rica as a new home away from home,” wrote publisher Kathleen Peddicord on the magazine’s Web site. “That’s because Costa Rica is no longer expensive – relatively speaking.”

According to promotional material for the seminar, International Living stopped promoting Costa Rica as a place to retire because it had become too expensive.

The magazine instead began concentrating on Costa Rica’s neighbors – Nicaragua and Panama – where the cost of living for foreigners remained lower.

During the past decade, however, property prices in those countries have risen, while Costa Rica’s infrastructure – roads, hospitals, shopping centers – has caught up with the prices.

The three-day event put on by International Living reflected its new emphasis on quality rather than cost in Costa Rica. The event, “Live and Prosper in Costa Rica Seminar,” ended yesterday and took place at Los Sueños Resort and Marina, one of the swankier tourist resorts in the country located in Playa Herradura on the central Pacific coast.

The seminar included talks on the real estate market, on leisure activities and on starting a business in Costa Rica.

Other countries in Latin America that International Living is touting at the moment include Argentina, Uruguay, Panama, Mexico and Nicaragua.