Nicoya Peninsula: the Costa Rica region with the most centenarians despite its relative poverty

Benerando López is a farmer who at age 99 was still planting rice for family consumption in Sámara, a coastal district on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. He is now 103 and blind, but he survives in enviable health, like many other centenarians who make this part of Costa Rica’s northern Pacific a “blue zone”: a region with a high concentration of long-lived people. José Flores — a man aged 119 whom researchers are trying to verify as the world’s oldest person — is also from there.

López lives in Sámara amid the tourist tide; it is a place where his wife still walks barefoot on their plot. Flores lives in a small village called Obandito de Sardinal. A few miles away, in Nandayure, there lived a woman named Teresa Ruiza, who died in 2021 at 102 after a life of constant work in which she raised 19 children, according to records from the Asociación Península de Nicoya Zona Azul.

In this region, which is part of the province of Guanacaste, there are 61 centenarians and that number could reach 73 by the end of 2026. Jorge Vindas, founder of the association cited, knows them all; his group documents and researches the peninsula’s longest-lived residents. Nicoya shares the same designation with five other places worldwide noted for their high density of centenarians. However, the Costa Rican region has one particular element: relative poverty.

“It is true that it is the poorest of all the ‘blue zones,’ but let’s define poverty,” Vindas qualifies, noting these are generations born in the early 20th century who grew up doing physical labor and eating simple but sufficient food despite shortages. They also grew up in tranquil environments, with close-knit families and a faith-based community that helped them endure hard experiences, such as burying children. If Costa Rica has never been a country of abundance, Nicoya was even less so. Even today poverty there is higher than the national average. “We were poor, but we always ate well,” a centenarian named Panchito Villegas told Vindas in the municipality of Nicoya. The other ‘blue zones,’ designated by the international organization Blue Zones, are in the United States, Europe and Japan — environments very different from this hot, dry region, which is home to just under 100,000 people across five municipalities.

Luis Rosero-Bixby, Costa Rica’s leading demographic researcher at the Centro Centroamericano de Población (CCP) at the state-run University of Costa Rica (UCR), is also clear on this. In 2005, after presenting an academic paper in France about the exceptionally low mortality of older adults across Costa Rica, Belgian demographer Michel Poulain — a pioneer of the “blue zone” concept — asked whether there were places in the Central American country that were even more exceptional for longevity. Rosero replied that, indeed, there was a zone in the country’s northwest, the Nicoya Peninsula, where older adults died at rates 20% lower than the rest of the country. In a study published in the journal Demography in 2008, Rosero showed that in Nicoya a 60-year-old man’s chance of reaching 100 was four times greater than that of other Costa Ricans, seven times greater than a Japanese man’s, and 10 times greater than an American man’s.

One peculiarity of the region was that it was a place of low socioeconomic development, without major specialized medical facilities, but with a strong primary healthcare system that includes regular home visits to older residents. Poulain and journalist Dan Buettner of National Geographic made several expeditions to Nicoya in 2007 and 2008 to verify that it was not another case of communities exaggerating ages or lacking reliable documentation. They concluded the estimates were valid and included the region in the club of ‘blue zones.’

“What stood out about the Nicoya Peninsula was that it was a region in a relatively poor country, with people living in houses with dirt floors. Later researchers saw that difficult economic conditions do not prevent long lives if other favorable factors are present,” Rosero tells EL PAÍS.

What are those factors? There are clues but no definitive answers. Genetic and cultural variables converge. Elements mentioned include strong family networks, physical activity, low obesity, natural foods and more specific dietary components. For example, the ancestral tradition of corn, with local particularities such as a preference for the yellow or ‘pujagua’ type, and purple or black varieties, as well as a process called nisquesado — cooking the kernels in water with wood-ash from the hearth to remove the husk. That raises the calcium content of meals, a mineral also higher in the area’s water and which may be related to fewer hip fractures at advanced ages, Rosero says, while cautioning these are hypotheses.

Clues in genetic material

Something has been proven, the expert adds: people over 60 in the region have longer telomeres, the chromosome tips that indicate biological aging and can be associated with stress — the shorter they are, the lower the additional life expectancy. It could be said that the Costa Rica motto “pura vida” (pure life) has a reflection in genetic data. “For some reason in this geographic area they have longer telomeres, roughly equivalent to an extra 10 years,” the specialist adds. Rosero’s research also indicates a greater Indo-American ancestry, from Chorotega indigenous groups, especially among the oldest people and survivors of severe illnesses in the first half of the century, before the expansion of basic state health services.

“These are clues, nothing definitive,” the demographer reiterates, obsessed with evidence to the point that he allows himself to doubt whether José Flores indeed reached 119, even though Costa Rica’s Civil Registry and Catholic baptismal records indicate that age. He notes a gap in information about Flores between 1907, the registered year of birth, and 1956, when he registered his first child. “It is very odd that a coastal man would have his first child at age 50,” he observes. Vargas, meanwhile, explains the gap as a consequence of decades in which Flores lived without a partner, working in other regions of the country, as his family recounts. He might also have had children earlier who were not recognized as his, as was common at the time, Vargas says, trusting the official Civil Registry’s reliability.

Together with a Spanish researcher named José Antonio Rabadán from the University of Alicante, Vargas is trying to certify documents so Flores can be recognized as the world’s oldest person. Rosero is worried. “The problem with promoting Don José’s story is that if it is later revealed internationally to be untrue, it would undermine all the serious work we have done documenting Nicoya’s exceptional longevity.”

In any case, Flores and his generation are examples of people born before the 1940s on the Nicoya Peninsula who lived more tranquil lives under conditions that are still not fully understood in terms of their longevity advantage. That advantage, however, begins to fade in later generations, as Rosero has shown in subsequent studies. Lifestyle changes were constant in the second half of the 20th century and have accelerated because of major transformations in the regional economy, now dependent on tourism and real estate development driven by thousands of foreigners seeking to learn about or perhaps experience some of the secrets that made the Nicoya Peninsula a ‘blue zone.’

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