Costa Rica’s plan to redirect tourism investment toward the Caribbean coast and the Southern Zone is now formally in the hands of Marcos Borges, the newly installed executive president of the Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT). But the timelines emerging from the two master plans he inherits make clear that any visible change for travelers, lodge operators, or coastal communities is still years away.
President Laura Fernández, who took office on May 8, made the assignment public when she introduced Borges to the press, telling him that Puntarenas and the Brunca Region would sit alongside the Caribbean as his principal areas of focus. The mandate builds on two master plans developed under former Tourism Minister William Rodríguez, both designed to identify zones where private-sector investment, municipal planning, and public infrastructure could move in the same direction at the same time.
The headline projects are by now familiar. In the Caribbean, the plan calls for eight enabling projects, including an upgrade of the Tortuguero aerodrome, a possible reroute of Route 36 near Limón to accommodate airport expansion, and improved water connectivity between Caribbean destinations so visitors no longer have to backtrack through Pococí and Guápiles to reach Tortuguero.
In the Southern Zone, the centerpiece is the proposed South Pacific International Airport at Sierpe de Osa, which would for the first time put the Osa Peninsula, Corcovado, Golfito, and Coto Brus within direct reach of international flights. What has come into sharper focus in recent days is how long all of this will take. Bathymetric studies are still underway at the Limón International Airport, which sits parallel to the coastline and requires depth measurements before any terminal expansion can be designed.
Construction is not projected to begin until 2027, and two prerequisite decisions remain open: whether to maintain the current runway alignment, and whether Route 36 — the highway linking Limón with Sixaola de Talamanca — must be modified because of its proximity to the runway.
Both decisions have implications for residents and tour operators along the southern Caribbean. The Southern Pacific project is further behind. Preliminary work has cleared the proposed Sierpe site of archaeological concerns, but unresolved expropriations and informal land occupations still need to be settled.
Earthworks are not expected to begin until 2028. The Sierpe proposal has also drawn scrutiny over its proximity to wetlands and the broader question of whether large-scale tourism infrastructure can be added to the Osa region without eroding the conservation values that make it commercially attractive in the first place.
A second, less visible obstacle runs through both plans: municipal zoning. Rodríguez was explicit that none of the proposed corridors can absorb meaningful private investment until local municipalities approve their planes reguladores, the regulatory plans that govern land use and coastal development. In several of the areas covered by the master plans, those documents have been in revision for years. Without them, hotel projects, marina concessions, and large-scale lodging investments cannot proceed at the scale either plan envisions.
The tourism sector itself has flagged uncertainty over how much political weight Borges will carry. Shirley Calvo, executive director of the Costa Rican National Chamber of Tourism (CANATUR), publicly noted to Monumental that the new ICT chief was announced without ministerial rank in the Fernández cabinet — a structural detail that historically has shaped how much leverage the institute holds inside the executive branch when negotiating against infrastructure, public works, and finance ministries. For Borges, the political calculus is therefore narrower than the master plans suggest.
The aviation projects are largely outside his control, sitting with the Ministry of Public Works and Transport and the airport regulators. Municipal zoning is the domain of local governments. What the ICT can drive directly is promotion, certification, and the alignment of public-private investment around the corridors where regulatory plans are already in place — a much smaller footprint than the maps would suggest.
Some of the regions named in the plans are already absorbing visitors at the limits of their current infrastructure. The South Caribbean — Cahuita, Puerto Viejo, and Manzanillo — has seen sustained growth in recent high seasons without the road, water, or waste-management investment to match. Puerto Jiménez and the gateway towns to Corcovado face similar pressures.
The risk for the Fernández administration is that “leveling the playing field,” as the president has framed the strategy, runs into the same constraint that has slowed previous attempts: the master plan moves faster than the public works that have to underwrite it.
For anyone planning trips into these regions over the next two seasons, the practical reality has not changed. Reaching Tortuguero still means a long ground transfer plus a boat. Reaching Corcovado still requires either a domestic flight into Drake Bay or Puerto Jiménez, or a long drive south. The political signal from the new government is significant. The infrastructure that would back it up is not yet on the ground.
