Santa Teresa, Costa Rica

I spent the past week in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, a small surf town in the Puntarenas Province. There are no stop signs or street lights on the unpaved streets of the town, but during the 3:30 rush hour, you hear a cacophony of laughter as opposed to honking. This small town- with a resident population of under 3000- seems to rely on communal joy as a source of fuel. Because the town is so isolated from any main city like San Jose, there is a lack of variety in job opportunities, resulting in what seems to be a lack of wealth disparity amongst the population. These somewhat limited jobs revolve mainly around tourism and fishing, two fairly job industries. In the absence of tourism due to COVID, Santa Teresa’s population relied heavily on fishing as a means to maintain a steady income. Armando, our hotel manager and a lifetime resident of Santa Teresa, let me know that COVID weighed heavily on the town, not because of case numbers, but because of the lack of fish on the coast of the surf town. When I first saw Santa Teresa beach, I was amazed by how seamlessly the jungle turned into the sand. After you take in the impressive setting, you notice that the sand is coated in a layer of tiny pieces of plastic, all different colors. These microplastics covering every beach in and around Santa Teresa don’t just impact the aesthetics of the beach. Instead, the microplastics lodge themselves into the digestive tracts of fish, essentially causing their appetites to disappear and eventually contributed to an earlier death. Microplastics also impact sea life's ability to reproduce, leading to a decline in fish population. According to a study conducted in July of 2020 published in Regional Studies in Marine Science: Volume 8, 100% of the sampled fish from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica contained traces of microplastic. With less fish to catch, the residents of Santa Teresa had less fish to sell, taking a toll on the small town’s economy. 

Road into Santa Teresa