The Municipal Council of Nicoya rejected the renewal of a concession in the Maritime Land Zone (Spanish acronym: ZMT) of the Lagarto River mangrove, located in Sámara. In addition, they decided to eliminate it completely.
The property is one of three plots of land on which the company Parkside Inmobiliaria Sociedad Anónima intended to develop Vistas de Sámara: a real estate project with 3,000 bedrooms distributed in a vertical condominium with 37 10-story towers and a horizontal one of 333 lots.
The concession, granted in November of 1989 to the Corporación Hotelera Sámara S.A., expired in November of 2009 but was in the renewal process since May of 2004, according to official letter AM-0034-012025 signed by the coordinator of the Municipality of Nicoya’s Maritime Land Zone (Spanish acronym: ZMT) department, Erika Matarrita
In the letter, Matarrita recommends that the council deny the extension and eliminate the concession because the land overlaps with the Lagarto River mangrove. “[Renewing it] would be incompatible with the principles of environmental protection and nature conservation, established in national legislation,” says the document issued by Matarrita.
The local government must now notify the concessionaire, who could eventually file appeals.
Sinac determined the area of the buried mangrove
The ZMT coordinator based her opinion on a warning that the National System of Conservation Areas (Spanish acronym: SINAC) issued to the municipality, in which they confirmed that four plots of land located in the ZMT of the Cangrejal sector in Sámara overlap with the mangrove.
The information from SINAC is part of the analysis ordered by the Constitutional Court in July of 2024 to determine the status and mark out the limits of the mangrove that was completely buried between 1989 and 1996. SINAC has until July of 2025 to complete the report.
The court’s order is the result of an appeal for protection filed by a community resident with the collaboration of environmental lawyer Álvaro Sagot.
Sagot explained to The Voice that mangroves can’t be administered by the municipalities. According to the lawyer, the piece of land that Corporación Hotelera Sámara S.A. had a concession for should become Natural Heritage land belonging to the state.
“The sites that are part of the State’s Natural Heritage, such as wetlands in this case, cannot remain under municipal administration…. The municipal council still has to express its opinion on the other areas that are in the maritime land zone,” Sagot emphasized.
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