Journey Within: Costa Rica
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Journey Within Costa Rica
Discover the magic of Costa Rica through an unforgettable journey blending adventure, relaxation, and well-being.
Marilia Moreno didn't go to Costa Rica to lie on a beach. The first episode of Journey Within takes her deep into the country's interior, to places most visitors never find on their own: an eco-village built around communal living, a pre-Columbian sweat lodge ceremony, a cacao farm run by an Indigenous community. The show is about inner travel as much as physical travel, and the itinerary that comes out of it reflects that.
This isn't a Costa Rica trip about ticking off ziplines. It's about what happens when you slow down enough to actually be somewhere.
Staying inside a Blue Zone
Zunya is an eco-village designed around the principles of Blue Zone living, the set of conditions researchers have linked to the world's longest-lived communities. Communal meals, shared purpose, time outdoors, minimal stress. Staying there is less like checking into a hotel and more like participating in a different way of organizing daily life, briefly, but meaningfully.
It's a useful first stop for setting the tone of the trip. You arrive with whatever pace you came from, and Zunya quietly resets it.
Temazcal and Cacao at La Senda
La Senda is where the trip shifts into something more deliberate. The Temazcal is a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge ceremony, guided and intentional, and not especially comfortable in the way a spa treatment is comfortable. It's cleansing in the older sense of the word. Paired with a cacao ceremony, it makes for a half-day that most travellers describe as one of the most memorable things they've done, not because it's exotic, but because it requires genuine presence.
The cacao itself is ceremonial-grade, prepared traditionally, and the ritual around it is led by local practitioners. It's worth going in without preconceptions.
Time with the Maleku
The Maleku are one of Costa Rica's few remaining Indigenous groups, and their territory in the northern lowlands is not a tourist attraction. The community welcomes visitors on their own terms: a dance ceremony, a guided visit to their cacao farm, and a conversation about what that relationship with land and tradition actually looks like in practice.
It's a different register from the wellness experiences. Less about you, more about listening.
Cala Luna and the Farm Table
Cala Luna is a boutique property on the Nicoya Peninsula that earns its wellness reputation. The body treatments are unhurried and thoughtfully done, and the surrounding landscape of the Tempisque River estuary adds something that purpose-built spa resorts often lack: a sense of place.
The farm-to-table session connects to that same idea. It isn't a cooking class. It's a closer look at where the food is coming from and what it takes to grow it in this climate, followed by eating what you've just learned about. Simple, but grounding.
Volcán Irazú's crater lake sits above the clouds at 3,400 metres — the kind of view that makes the climb feel like the point, not just the payoff.
The Volcano Hike
The trip closes with a hike to a volcano viewpoint, and it earns its place at the end rather than the beginning. By that point, you've spent days moving slowly and deliberately. The physical effort of the hike, and the scale of what you see at the top, lands differently than it would have on day one.
Costa Rica has no shortage of volcano hikes. This one is about context.
Plan Your Own Journey
The full itinerary is customizable between 7 and 10 days, built around the experiences Marilia explores in the episode.
Journey Within Costa Rica
Discover the magic of Costa Rica through an unforgettable journey blending adventure, relaxation, and well-being.
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