Global Waves

From North Carolina, the trip to Nosara, Costa Rica was more than 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles). The energy carried by the waves, which propels me on my surfboard each morning, could have also traveled several hundred kilometers to meet me in the green waves (Butt, 37). But, the glassy waves are only a fraction of the global waves affecting the town of Nosara. Surfing, as Comer explained, “had emerged as one possible expression of the problematic of globalization. . . Surfing had set people, money, goods, and ideas into motion in ways that created new forms of identity sociality, commerce, and politics” (Comer, 13). Surfing, is a vehicle of globalization. It acts as a wave, transferring energy worldwide in the form of economic structures, money, values, cultural practices, and environmental protections.

Nosara is not immune to this global transfer of energy: transnational surf culture and the economic structures that come with it. The chest-high, clean, consistent waves and warm weather at Playa Guiones caught the entrepreneurial eye of many foreign investors in the early 2000s, including the Johnson family (of the American company Johnson & Johnson). The Johnson’s followed surfing (as a vehicle of globalization) to the town of Nosara where they now own multiple successful businesses including the Harmony Hotel and the Harbor Reef Hotel.

Increased investment and as a result increased tourism to Nosara has been beneficial as well as hurtful to the local community, just as it was to Sayulita, Mexico. In Sayulita as well as Nosara locals no longer occupy the areas directly adjacent to the ocean. Comer explains that Sayulitans “have had to relocate to the outskirts of town,” as a result of foreign investors interest in the town. But, Comer also discovered that “Today Sayulitans believe themselves better off, with lucrative jobs and larger and better appointed houses. . . Both boys and girls will have better opportunities in the new Sayulita” (Comer, 146).

Playa Guiones



Harmony Hotel

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