The town that became a city: Jacó, as told by the man who governed it twice

Marvin Elizondo came to Jacó in 1977 for a two-week job and never left. Four decades later, as a two-term former mayor of Garabito, he retraces the leap from a gravel-road fishing town to one of Costa Rica's most dynamic real estate hubs, and points to the unfinished business that growth left behind.

By Marvin Elizondo, former Mayor of Garabito

When Marvin Elizondo first came down to Jacó in 1977, the trip from Costa Rica's Central Valley took six or seven hours over gravel roads. He had never seen the beach, and was only supposed to stay two weeks to handle a warehouse and accounting job for the Hotel Irazú. He finished the task in a few days, offered to take on more, and that gesture opened the door to twelve years at what was then the Best Western Hotel, "practically my school," he says today. Decades later, that same man would go on to serve two terms as mayor of Garabito.

The Jacó he describes from those early years is almost unrecognizable next to today's: a handful of hotels, a few open-air ranchos, a main avenue that was still just a dirt path, and weekend tourism made up mostly of Canadians over forty. The first major economic break, he recalls, didn't come from real estate but from film: sometime between 1985 and 1989, the shooting of a movie about Christopher Columbus turned Jacó, for a few weeks, into a film set, with dozens of locals working as extras and restaurants booked out entirely for the production crew.

One name Elizonda brought up was developer Pat Hundley who was one of the first to build Condominium projects in Jaco and through his philanthropy helped create the Municipal Police and other ventures that greatly supported Jaco and the surrounding area. One on those stories he tells with evident relish is Jaco's first fire truck, saved from being reassigned to Parrita at the eleventh hour.

By then, Elizondo was no longer just a witness to the change but one of its drivers: first as a business owner, and later, from 2006 onward, as a council member and mayor. His leap into politics, he says, wasn't born of long-calculated ambition but of a single scene: one Sunday, watching city tours full of Canadian tourists drive past mountains of trash piled along the main avenue (collection happened only twice a week), he asked himself how it was possible to show that to visitors coming from "such a clean, orderly country." That's when, as he puts it, "the bug bit me."

His time leading the municipality, building the central park and civic center, creating the Municipal Police, the lifeguard corps and the municipal band, paving streets, and instituting daily beach and avenue cleanup, coincided with the canton's years of fastest real estate expansion. RE/MAX, Century 21, and Coldwell Banker arrived shortly after the marina was established, and today, Elizondo says, Jacó is going through a resurgence reminiscent of the boom of the early 2000s, following the 2009 real estate crisis. The canton's low density, he argues, still leaves room to grow, as long as that growth doesn't neglect the resource underpinning everything else: water.

Development, though, brought its own reverse side. Elizondo doesn't shy away from the subject: he acknowledges rising crime and drug use tied to the very economic power the area attracts, and describes bluntly the assessment he inherited when he took office in 2006, when a report by the newspaper La Nación described Jacó as "the sewer of the Pacific." His response was to create the Municipal Police (twelve officers at first, growing to as many as thirty) and a video surveillance system of roughly fifteen cameras along Avenida Pastor Díaz that, by his account, was working normally when he left office. His concern today is that the system was dismantled by later administrations under the promise of a better project that, years on, still hasn't materialized.

It's on the ground of unfinished business that Elizondo's account grows sharper. He speaks of a sanitary sewer plan designed during his term, budgeted at twenty-two million dollars, which a later government modified and shelved. He also speaks of a coastal boulevard he himself championed and which, he says, was left unfinished "due to political rivalries" despite having the budget in place, a project meant to make up, through public space and infrastructure, for what Jacó's beach lacks in natural beauty compared with other Costa Rican coastlines.

Looking back over the last twenty-five years, Elizondo also reclaims a less-told story: that of the canton as a cultural and sporting hub, with the 2009 surfing events (the World Championship and that year's Reef Games) as its high point, and the later rise of local surfers like Carlos Muñoz. He regrets that momentum wasn't sustained, pointing to what he describes as internal rivalries within the sport's federations, and warns that the gap left by the decline of cultural and sporting spaces (the music school, the civic center, the municipal band) is, in his reading, part of what has left Jacó more exposed to headlines about prostitution and drugs than to ones recognizing its real development.

Marvin Elizondo's account isn't that of an outside critic, but of someone who helped build much of what he celebrates today, and much of what he now questions. His conclusion, more than a closed balance sheet, reads as a call: for development that is a genuinely joint effort between public and private sectors, and for a community, starting with its own neighborhoods, that stops relying solely on the municipality or the police to look after what he still considers a privileged place within Costa Rica.