(Credit: Jacob Lund/Shutterstock) The Nicoya peninsula in northwestern Costa Rica is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. This 75-mile sliver of land, just south of the Nicaraguan border, is covered with cattle pastures and tropical rain forests that stretch down to the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. The coastline is dotted with enclaves of expats who fill their time surfing, learning yoga and meditating on the beach. For the locals, life is not so idyllic. They live in small, rural villages with limited access to basics such as electricity, linked by rough tracks that are dusty in the dry season and often impassable when it rains. The men earn a living by fishing and farming, or work as laborers or sabaneros (cowboys on huge cattle ranches), while the women cook on wood-burning stoves. Yet Nicoyans have a surprising claim to fame that is attracting the attention of scientists from around the world. Their secret was uncovered in 2005 by Luis Rosero-Bixby, a demographer at the University of Costa Rica in San José. He used electoral records to work out how long Costa Ricans were living, and found that their life expectancy is surprisingly high. In general, people live longest in the world’s richest countries, where they have the most comfortable lives, the best health care and the lowest risk of infection. But that wasn’t the case here.
The Nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica. (Credit: Hugo Brizard/Shutterstock) Costa Rica’s per capita income is only about a fifth that of the U.S., but if its residents survive the country’s relatively high rates of infections and accidents early in life, it turns out that they are exceedingly long-lived — an effect that is strongest in men. Costa Rican men aged 60 can expect to live another 22 years, Rosero-Bixby found, slightly higher than in Western Europe and the U.S. If they reach 90, they can expect to live another 4.4 years, six months longer than any other country in the world. The effect is even stronger in the Nicoya peninsula, where 60-year-old men have a life expectancy of 24.3 years — two to three years longer than even the famously long-lived Japanese. Nicoya is one of the country’s poorest regions, so their secret can’t be better education or health care. There must be something else. Another longevity expert, Michel Poulain of the Estonian Institute for Population Studies in Tallinn, traveled to Nicoya with the journalist Dan Buettner in 2006 and 2007 to investigate Rosero-Bixby’s findings. The pair were working for the National Geographic Society, identifying long-lived communities around the world — which they dubbed “Blue Zones”—and attempting to work out their secrets. Other examples included Sardinia, Italy, and Okinawa, Japan. In Nicoya, Poulain and Buettner met people like Rafael Ángel Leon Leon, a 100-year-old still harvesting his own corn and beans and keeping livestock, with a wife 40 years his junior. Living nearby was 99-year-old Francesca Castillo, who cut her own wood and twice a week walked a mile into town. And there was 102-year-old Ofelia Gómez Gómez, who lived with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. When Buettner’s team visited, she recited from memory a six-minute poem by Pablo Neruda. All of the elderly people they saw were still mentally, physically and socially active, despite their advanced age. Poulain and Buettner drew up a list of things that might be helping Nicoyans to age so well. They have active lifestyles, even in old age. They have strong religious faith. The lack of electricity for lighting means they go to bed early, sleeping an average of eight hours a night. They drink calcium-rich water (which is good for the heart) and eat antioxidant-rich fruits.
