The couple, who own Atardecer Dorado, a well-known restaurant serving traditional Costa Rican fare in Manzanillo overlooking the Pacific Ocean, used to take a modest fishing boat out to catch what the diners – and the family – would eat, supplementing their diet with the mangos, papaya and watermelon grown on their patch of land.
We experience real life on a typical Costa Rican farm with a Tico family ($132/£105pp for 3-4 people, bookable through hotel) where traditional methods are used to rear animals, cut sugar cane and make cheese.
In the early days Berta would cook on wood – shellfish and snapper, tortillas she had made with the corn she ground herself – and they would climb the steep hill next to their plot armed with machetes to cut down the branches of guava, madrone and guazuma trees to fuel the wood burner.
The family works hard to serve up our breakfast of local cheese, which tastes like a cross between ricotta and cottage, fresh tortillas made by the matriarch and other home-grown delights, before showing us how the oxen walk in circles to drive a vice which crushes the sugar canes and squeezes out the juice.
I went on holiday to a Blue Zone to find the secret to long life ‘Down here most people live to 90 and a lot to 100.
