Costa Rica

Guanacaste is the driest region of Costa Rica: a tropical dry forest that drops its leaves in summer and turns gold while the rest of the country stays green. That climate built a cuisine on corn — the oldest maize traditions in the country survive here, in tortillas ground on stone and in the sour, fermented drinks that go with them.

Salt is still harvested by hand from the flats near Colorado de Abangares. Tamarind grows in nearly every yard, and the guanacaste tree that gives the province its name shades the cattle ranches that have defined it for three centuries.

The boats land at Playas del Coco and Tamarindo through the morning. What comes up depends on the season and the swell.

The wildest coast in the country. Corcovado holds one of the last lowland rainforests on the Pacific — National Geographic once called it the most biologically intense place on earth — and the Golfo Dulce is one of only four tropical fjords in the world, deep and calm enough that whales come to calve in it.

The valleys inland grow pineapple and wild cacao, and the Boruca and Ngäbe peoples still farm here as they have for centuries. The coast gives coconut, tuna and yellowtail.

Distances are long and the roads are slow. That is exactly why so few kitchens come this far.

Altitude changes everything. Between 1,000 and 2,000 metres, the valley grows what the lowlands cannot: strawberries, stone fruit, leafy greens, and the arabica that built the country in the nineteenth century — Costa Rica was the first Central American nation to grow coffee commercially, and the law still forbids planting anything but arabica.

Zarcero and the hills of Alfaro Ruiz are dairy country. The fresh cheeses and the natilla that appear on nearly every Costa Rican table start there.

Three quarters of the country lives in this valley, and its markets — the Feria Verde, the Mercado Central — are where most of our sourcing conversations began.