Environment Minister Mónica Navarro Del Valle has removed the director of the Osa Conservation Area six days after he reduced tourist capacity at Corcovado National Park’s Sirena sector over a years-long sewage discharge inside the park, a decision that has drawn protests on the southern Pacific coast.
Juan José Jiménez Espinoza, who also served as Corcovado’s administrator, was reassigned within the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC) to head a territorial information and regulation department at the agency’s executive secretariat. The move was ordered in a July 1 letter signed by Navarro Del Valle, which described the reassignment as immediate and justified it on grounds of administrative efficiency and a human-resources criterion, according to La Nación, which reviewed the document.
The reassignment came days after Jiménez, on June 26, cut the daily visitor limit at the Sirena Biological Station. That decision responded to a sanitary crisis: the station’s wastewater treatment plant had been discharging sewage into a creek near Sirena. Records indicate the plant released fecal matter and untreated wastewater into a tributary of the Sirena River for at least two years, starting in 2024, inside a park that has been protected since 1975. Internal complaints date to July 2025, and Health Ministry inspections confirmed the uncontrolled discharge.
Asked about the timing, Navarro Del Valle acknowledged in writing that the decision followed the capacity reduction but insisted it was made because Jiménez’s services “were of greater use in another area” of the ministry and that the move “responds to institutional needs.” The director’s post has been assigned on an interim basis to Olger Méndez Fallas, the area’s current technical director.
The decision has already spilled into the streets. On Wednesday, demonstrators blocked the bridge at Uvita on the Costanera Sur highway to protest the handling of Corcovado’s visitor limits.
Corcovado, in the remote Osa Peninsula, is one of Costa Rica’s most popular ecotourism destinations, and Sirena is its main access point for day visitors and overnight guests. Capacity limits and management turmoil there directly affect trip planning for travelers and the tour operators, lodges and communities of Drake Bay, Puerto Jiménez and Sierpe that depend on the park.
