Under the grass in a pasture located in Cangrejal de Sámara, there are layers of gravel. Buried deeper down is the Lagarto River mangrove. Satellite photos from the National Geographic Institute (IGN) show that the mangrove, which covers some 9.6 hectares (23.7 acres), ended up completely buried between 1989 and 1996.
During that period, Juanita Castillo was the owner of the Lagarto Bar, located next to where Pablito’s Bar is now. Juanita remembers seeing rows of trucks pouring fill dirt onto the mangrove every day.
“There were dump trucks that came and went, that came and went every day…. The man [responsible] also made a breakwater so that the sea wouldn’t carry the fill dirt away,” Juanita commented. The amount of material dumped is equivalent to “several hundred or perhaps thousands of cubic meters of material,” according to the technical report ACT-OR–T–313-2021 (page 143, Folio 132) from the National System of Conservation Areas (Spanish acronym: SINAC), issued on June 16, 2021.
Most of the land shown in the IGN photographic analysis is made up of two private properties registered with the Civil Registry in the name of Concol S.A. and Corporación Hotelera Sámara S.A. The latter company also has a concession within the mangrove’s Maritime Land Zone (Spanish acronym: ZMT), granted in 1989 by the Municipality of Nicoya. The concession is currently expired and in the process of being extended, confirmed the coordinator of Nicoya’s ZMT, Ericka Matarrita.
The pasture is the scene of a dispute between people from the community who want to recover the mangrove and Vistas de Sámara, a real estate project that intends to build a total of 3,000 bedrooms distributed in a vertical condominium with 37 10-story towers, and a horizontal one of 333 lots.
SINAC has yet to determine the exact area where the mangrove was located. But despite the possible presence of this ecosystem in part of these lands, on February 28, 2024, the National Environmental Technical Secretary (Spanish acronym: SETENA) approved the environmental viability for Vistas de Sámara.
In addition, the Water Administration of the Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) confirmed to The Voice that between November of 2023 and April of 2024, it authorized Cancol S.A. and Corporación Hotelera Sámara S.A. to drill a well each within their private lands, which could be partially over the mangrove.
According to Juanita, who is part of the Board of Directors of the aqueduct, the project had already requested 1,500 water hookups within the land from the Sámara Asada. The ASADAdenied the water approval letters, Juanita specified, because since October of 2022, they have not had technical viability due to limitations in water storage, according to the Costa Rican Institute of Aqueducts and Sewers (AyA). This means that they can’t provide new water connections.
On Tuesday, August 13, The Voice requested information from the Sámara Asada about the amount of water requested by the applicant, as well as the date the request was submitted and who submitted it. The community aquedcut denied the information and responded that it was “private information,” despite the fact that the Constitutional Court indicates that “the information they keep in relation to that service is clearly of public interest,” according to ruling No. 2012-016665 of November 30, 2012. The request for public information is still in process.
The Vistas de Sámara project is in the name of Parkside Inmobiliaria Sociedad Anónima, whose representative is developer Michael Tarcica Galindo, who also presides over Vistas de Santa Bárbara (in the province of Heredia), a complex of 835 houses and 1,385 parking spaces in that canton of Heredia. That project was also rejected by local residents due to the water flow required by the condominiums.
Tarcica is a founding member of Urbania, a company dedicated to real estate projects throughout the country. One example is Almare, a residential complex facing Bejuco Beach in Puntarenas, whose main attraction is a 2-hectare (5-acre) artificial lagoon. The cost of these properties ranges from $120 million to almost $200 million, according to the company’s website.
The Voice contacted Tarcica to include his impressions on the project and the mangrove. The developer asked for two days’ time to respond to the media but then didn’t answer his cell phone again.
SINAC needs to investigate the mangrove’s real area
The Constitutional Court ordered SINAC to investigate the state of the land where the mangrove was located, to determine the real area of the ecosystem and “to provide a definitive solution” within a period of 12 months – which ends in July 2025 – according to the ruling.
The court gave this directive due to an appeal for protection filed by a community resident, with collaboration from environmental lawyer Álvaro Sagot. The complainants claim that authorities did not protect the wetland. In addition, they point out that since 2022, they have requested information from SINAC about the mangrove, as well as marking out and restoring the affected land, but they haven’t received a response.
The report that the institution needs to prepare will show whether the private properties and the concession are in the mangrove area and if they were correctly registered. “All those areas are the ones that have to be legally analyzed,” commented the director of SINAC’s Tempisque Conservation Area (Spanish acronym: ACT), Nelson Marín.
Sagot welcomed the resolution from the Constitutional Court and believes that the sentence could be in favor of its restoration.
The principle of irreducibility of the forests implies that, along with the people who have caused the damage, the State is the main party responsible for trying to restore the ecosystems that have been damaged as soon as possible,” Sagot commented.
The lawyer also explained that if SINAC’s report shows that the private properties are on mangrove sites, the properties could only be built on in the sectors that don’t coincide with the area of the ecosystem and in the maritime land zone, the concession should be annulled by the municipality. Even the environmental viability of the Vistas de Sámara condominiums could be suspended.
“After 200 meters (of the ZMT), the wetland becomes private property, but Article 19 of the Forestry Law also establishes that no change in land use can be made [on a forest or a mangrove],” explained Sagot.
While SINAC prepares the report, the pronouncement doesn’t stop the procedures for Vistas de Sámara or any other project that they want to carry out on that land, according to the lawyer.
Community on alert
“There are people who think it’s nice to have those buildings there and they say that it’s work for the people. Lies. They are condominiums that at most hire people for security…. The builders are possibly going to bring cheap labor and it’s known that they are Nicaraguans because they bring illegals, pay them what they want and make them work like donkeys,” Juanita remarked.
Juanita, along with a group of neighbors, collected 360 signatures to add to a letter to the local government expressing their opposition to building the project.
The letter was delivered to the Municipality of Nicoya by the president of the Samara Integral Development Association (ADI), Patrick McGoey, during a hearing at the municipal council session on July 9. In his speech, McGoey asked the municipality not to allow any type of construction and to protect the land from commercial development.
“While developers seek water connections and construction permits to build on the mangrove, it’s crucial to emphasize that the mangroves are protected under the constitution as Natural Heritage of the State and should not be developed,” expressed the ADI’s president during the session.
McGoey was accompanied by 10 residents of Sámara, including Narcisa Díaz, a 60-year-old Sámara resident who remembers the mangrove full of herons and fish such as snapper. “I had a receiving post across from there and they caught about 200 kilos a week. The boats went out to fish and they said that all the production came from the mangrove…. Today there is nothing,” said Narcisa in the municipal hall.
To me, the mangrove isn’t dead. It’s covered by layers and layers of dirt. But that opens and is reborn again,” she said hopefully. “Many herons and all that left. The beach now isn’t the same as when it was working, but I think that if it is opened again, the mangrove will re-emerge.”
The council received the document. The president of the Municipal Council, Sandra María Muñoz, commented that the council members are unaware of the existence of a project in the area and pointed out that the legal commission recommended to the mayor that he shouldn’t give any construction permit until the issue was clearer. Mayor Carlos Armando didn’t comment on the issue.
However, currently, the municipality can’t deny building permits on private properties because there is currently no legal restriction in the National Registry of Costa Rica to prohibit it, according to the Municipality of Nicoya’s coordinator of the Department of Construction Control and Public Works, Cesar Espinoza.
When SINAC determines the area of the mangrove, the municipality will only be able to grant permits for the parts of the lots that aren’t on it. “The only reason to deny a permit is that the mangrove area covers 100% of the lot,” explained Espinoza. In the case of the property’s concession within the ZMT, this must be current in order to obtain a land use permit.
But until now, the local government hasn’t received any request for construction on the two private lots or on the land within the ZMT.
Some roots are showing
Recovering the mangrove shouldn’t take more than 10 years, marine biologist Carlos Pérez and the natural resources manager for the National Learning Institute (INA), Mainor Villalobos, expressed with optimism when consulted by The Voice.
To both specialists, the process is clear: open channels so that salt water enters the land and fills the soil with the nutrients necessary for the growth of the mangrove, plant red mangrove trees and wait for other species to start growing.
You can regenerate it and over time, it will reach a configuration very, very similar to the one it had originally, but it will never be the same,” warned Villalobos.
The ACT’s director is not so optimistic. According to him, the cost of removing the tons of fill dirt exceeds the institution’s economic capacity. “With the operational resources we have, we’re barely getting through [the tasks] for the year.”
“I’ve heard of 40,000 [dump trucks]; 20,000; 13,000, depending on who fantasizes about adding or removing them…. I’d prefer to be compensated elsewhere, be it a protected area or the acquisition of a property that consolidates a national park or a refuge, without spending resources because most likely it would be up to the State [to restore the mangrove] and the State is us,” Marín told The Voice.
Despite the difficulties expressed by the ACT’s director, Juanita is convinced that recovering the mangrove is the best for the community and the biodiversity of Sámara.
“I’ve traveled quite a bit, thanks to God, and I’ve seen Acapulco, Miami, but let’s not go too far; Tamarindo, Nosara, Jacó… to me, that seems disgusting. I don’t want that for Sámara because of the contamination that this type of development brings,” Juanita emphasized.
Every morning, Juanita walks the bay of Sámara from one end to the other, not only to admire its beauty, but to see what changes she perceives in a district where buildings quickly take over the landscape. If she sees something suspicious, she doesn’t hesitate to file an environmental complaint.
During her surveillance rounds, when Juanita reaches the breakwater that protects the landfill from high tide, she feels “impotent due to having seen those dump trucks filling the mangrove and not having done anything about it.”
The waves against the rocks have worn away the layers that buried the Lagarto River’s mangrove. Juanita observes them and notices bits of forest that are peeking out.
“You see that there are little trees there, there are little trees that are coming out. I say that if one could remove that fill dirt, I think we would recover it,” she said.
Comments