Drive from one end of Santa Teresa to the other and you're on the same road the whole time. There's no bypass, no parallel avenue, no second route that lets you skip past whatever is happening at the moment. Every surfboard, every delivery truck, every tourist rental and every neighbor walking to the pulpería moves along that single stretch of ballast and dirt that runs past Satori Sushi, past the Airstream trailer parked outside Somos, past the open-air terrace at Manzú where the Rondón stew earned a spot in The 50 Best Discovery in 2024.
That road is currently the subject of three separate arguments. A tourism chamber is fighting to keep a gas station off it. A lawyer spent six years suing two municipalities to get it paved. And the same chamber has been quietly funding a police station along it, one construction phase at a time, because waiting for public money wasn't an option. None of these stories made headlines outside Costa Rica. Together, they say something residents already sense but rarely see spelled out: in Santa Teresa, the infrastructure that actually gets built is the infrastructure someone privately forces into existence, not the infrastructure a municipal budget delivers on schedule.
The fight over what goes where
In March 2026, the Blue Zone Chamber of Tourism and Commerce, known locally as CATUCZA, came out against a proposed gas station slated for a site on the main road, directly across from a well-known local business. The chamber said the project doesn't fit the town's identity as a low-impact, nature-first destination, and it opened a formal request for information from the Municipality of Cóbano, the Ministry of Environment and Energy, and the National Technical Environmental Secretariat.
CATUCZA describes its own mission as promoting regenerative tourism across Santa Teresa, Malpaís, Playa Hermosa and Manzanillo, development that stays in step with the coastline instead of paving over it. That's not abstract branding. It's the same logic that's kept this stretch of coast free of the multi-story hotels and beachfront bars that define other Guanacaste towns. A gas station with underground tanks a few hundred meters from the surf break reads, to the chamber and to a lot of longtime residents, as a direct test of whether that model holds when a landowner wants something else.
As of the most recent public reporting, no detailed response had come back from Cóbano, MINAE, or SETENA. The proposal's actual standing in the approval process, and what environmental review it would need to clear, are still open questions. That uncertainty is itself the point. Nobody in Santa Teresa is waiting on a press release to decide how they feel about it.
Why paving a road here took six years
The dust and mud that residents deal with daily aren't an accident of geography. Of the area's roughly 218 kilometers of local road network, about 90 percent is gravel or dirt, which means dry season traffic kicks up the kind of fine dust that coats cars, porches, and lungs, while rainy season turns the same roads into standing mud.
Fixing that took a private lawsuit, not a public works schedule. Walter Brenes, a local lawyer and surfer, opened a legal fight against the Municipality of Puntarenas and the Council of the District of Cóbano back in February 2018. The case dragged for six years before it produced a signed settlement between Brenes, Ronny Montero, Mayor of the Municipal Council of the District of Cóbano, and Randall Chavarría Matarrita, Mayor of the Municipality of Puntarenas. That agreement, announced in September 2024, committed the municipalities to pave and improve drainage across a defined set of communities.
Here's what's actually covered under that agreement:
| Community | What the project addresses |
|---|---|
| Playa del Carmen to Quebrada del Carmen | Primary paving corridor named in the settlement |
| Delicias | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| San Isidro | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| Cabuya | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| Cóbano | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| Bello Horizonte | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| La Esperanza | Road reconstruction and drainage |
| Santa Teresa | Paved beach access, curbs, gutters, signage |
Two years after that settlement, the physical work is the part residents are still tracking closest. Reporting since the agreement described paving and drainage work as underway, but the dust that motivated the original lawsuit is still part of daily life on the sections that haven't been reached yet. A legal victory and a finished road are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where Santa Teresa residents have learned to keep their expectations calibrated.
The police station the chamber built one phase at a time
CATUCZA didn't just fight over what shouldn't go on the main road. It also helped build something that wasn't there before. Since August 2024, chamber affiliate contributions have covered the rent on the space where Santa Teresa's Tourist Police currently operates, a temporary arrangement while construction continues on a permanent station. As of CATUCZA's most recent construction update, that new station stood at 57 percent complete, funded by a chamber the organization describes as split evenly between Costa Rican-owned businesses and foreign-owned ones.
That's a meaningful detail on its own. It means the safety infrastructure residents rely on right now exists because a business association decided to pay for it directly, not because a municipal budget line came through. Whether that's a sign of a community stepping up or a sign of how thin public services stretch in a district built around Cóbano rather than Santa Teresa itself is a fair question, and probably both are true at once.
The pattern underneath all three stories
None of this is a coincidence of timing. Look at what actually moved in each case. The gas station fight is being fought by a chamber, not a government agency, and its outcome depends on whether that chamber's pressure campaign works the way Brenes' lawsuit eventually did. The road got paved (or is getting paved) because one resident with legal standing forced a six-year court process, not because the district prioritized it. The police station exists in its current form because business owners pooled dues to rent a building and then to build a new one, one construction phase at a time.
The common thread is that public initiative here tends to follow private pressure, not precede it. That's worth understanding if you live here, because it tells you where to look when something needs to change. It's not the municipal council meeting that moves fastest. It's the chamber vote, the lawsuit, the affiliate contribution. Santa Teresa's infrastructure gets built by the people who show up with money or legal standing and are willing to wait years for either to pay off.
It also explains why the town's character has held together as well as it has. A gas station proposal gets a real fight instead of a quiet approval because the same organizations that fund the police station also have standing to object to what goes up next door. The regenerative tourism model CATUCZA talks about isn't enforced by a zoning code. It's enforced by the same small set of people who keep showing up to defend it, one dispute at a time.
What residents are actually watching for
If you live here, the open questions are specific. Does the gas station clear environmental review, and does CATUCZA's push actually stop it or just slow it down. Does the paving reach the stretch in front of your house this year or next. Does the new Tourist Police station open before the temporary arrangement becomes the permanent one by default. None of these have settled answers yet, which is exactly why they're worth tracking rather than treating as finished news.
That's the texture of daily life on this particular road right now. Not a finished story, but three unfinished ones running at the same time, on the same strip of ground, funded and fought by the same overlapping group of people who decided, one lawsuit and one chamber contribution at a time, that this town was worth the trouble.
If you're already living this story day to day, Engel & Völkers Costa Rica keeps closer tabs on these local threads than most, because our advisors are on this peninsula, not reading about it secondhand. When the questions above get answered, we'll be the ones who noticed first.
