Papagayo golf course and development

Here is another photo showing the Papagayo Golf Course, with the Gulf of Papagayo by in the distance. The project today is extremely environmentally conscious, perhaps in part because of the history I mentioned yesterday of violations in its early development.

The new government in the late 1990's decided that despite the violations, the development was too far along to stop, so they changed developers and allowed the project to be developed with strict controls.

You can see that much of the peninsula contains dense forest. The golf course is spread out over almost twice the acreage of a typical golf course. The forest here has hundreds of trees of protected species, and every protected tree with a trunk more than two inches (6 cm) in diameter is plotted GPS coordinates GPS and cannot be cut or moved. Natural predators are used for insect control.

The golf course has been certified by the Audobon Society as a Cooperative Sanctuary. There are lots of animals that share the peninsula with the resort, and of course that is part of the attraction for visitors. More about that, later.

This week we are showing photos from the Villa Serbelloni, a retreat for scholars owned by the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.