The Voice of Guanacaste is Costa Rica’s first non-profit bilingual newspaper, and the only hyperlocal media outlet with an investigative and fact-checking unit in the country. For more than 10 years, we’ve been doing ethical, participatory, quality journalism in the province to provide timely access to relevant content and unite communities to help them develop. We’ve done investigative reports on resilience and climate change, coastal development and gentrification, violence against women, immigration and labor exploitation, culture, and public funds.

Every day, a team of journalists, editors, designers and professional photographers keep our readers informed with professional, quality content, always hand in hand with the support of our community networks. Together with them, we denounce what’s wrong, we discover who is responsible and, above all, we connect communities from all corners of the region and draw attention to them.

The Voice of Guanacaste began in 2002 as The Voice of Nosara and rather than a newspaper, it was a printed newsletter with local news. In 2006, John S. Johnson and his wife, Susan Johnson (U.S. citizens in love with Costa Rica who believe in the importance of local information), acquired the newspaper in order to continue the project, since it was about to close down. Starting in 2010, in response to our readers’ requests, we also began publishing news from the neighboring communities of Nosara.

Thanks to support from local businesses, financing from the Johnsons and the unwavering following of our readers, the newspaper grew and in 2013, we became The Voice of Guanacaste, branching out to provide useful information to communities throughout the province.

With the aim of maintaining editorial integrity and independence, in 2015, The Voice of Guanacaste became a non-profit association. You can read more about how we’re funded here, and about who owns The Voice here.

In the last five years, we’ve earned several national and international awards. In 2020, we won the Jorge Vargas Gené/Óscar Cordero National Award for our binational, cross-border investigative reporting on “The Drawn Border.” We also received an honorable mention in the 2018 Pío Víquez National Prize for Journalism, and first place in the Ángela Acuña Braun National Prize for Gender Equality and Equity. In 2017, we took second place in the Social Innovation category at the VIVA Schmidheiny Awards. In addition, together with other Latin American media, we also won the 2020 Ortega and Gasset international award for the best journalistic investigation with the collaborative journalistic work “Transnationals of Faith” and we earned the 2020 Fetisov Journalism Awards international prize in the category of Contribution to Civil Rights for another collaborative report, “Migrants from Another World.”

With our different projects, we’ve trained more than 100 people in access to public information and journalistic and citizen coverage of local problems. In 2022, more than 500,000 people read our articles and we published more than 110 stories, 38% of which were about communities and service, 11% about human rights, 20% about electoral politics, 10% about cultural identity and 21% about a variety of other topics.