Costa Rica

Sea Glass From Costa Rica

I have been traveling to Costa Rica on a regular basis since the late 1980's. Although we have quite a bit of sea glass from Costa Rica I can not say that it is a sea glass collecting destination. We have returned home many times with no sea glass at all or just a few pieces and every now and then we return home with a few pounds of sea glass.

While travelling in Costa Rica we avoid the tourist meccas of Tamarindo - Playas del Coco, Jaco Beach and Dominical entirely. Friends tell me that they find sea glass at Playa Conchal, which is in the Tamarindo - Playas del Coco region but that it is not worth going there just for that. When my husband and I visit Costa Rica we walk the beaches for miles and miles to access remote surf breaks. Most of the sea glass we collected there was the odd piece found over vast stretches of beach when we weren't even looking.

I have had a few epic days of collecting in Costa Rica where I found a lot of sea glass in one place. I will never forget the morning I spent hours looking through a large shell pile, where I found a lot of green sea glass, on a beach in a cove that was canopied by Plumeria trees. As I sat on the beach Plumeria flowers, which have an intoxicating scent, were raining down around me onto the beach. It was such a sublime event that I would have been happy enough to have not found any sea glass.

Despite all the rivers that run to the sea there is not a lot of sea glass in Costa Rica. One reason is that Costa Rica has had a strict bottle return policy for years. When I first started visiting the country if you wanted to leave the store with a drink they would pour it in a plastic bag and put a straw in it as the bottles carried a hefty deposit ( Yes the "to go" plastic bag negates the purpose of the recycling law ). That empty bottle had value and they were not letting it out of their sight! You often see cases of empty bottles stacked up at bars, restaurants and stores waiting to be cashed in. Because of the Costa Rican recycling effort there is not a lot of glass that finds it's way to sea. Costa Rica is far from perfect environmentally but the country has been a shining example environmentally in many ways and it's beaches are far cleaner than the beaches in Puerto Rico and other Central American Countries.