Our regular contributor Emily Hill recounts her recent stay at The Retreat Costa Rica, a healing retreat in Atenas, where the land, the food and the people who show up foster a true sense of community.
You’ve landed forty minutes out of San Jose, up through the central valley, past coffee plants and cattle fences and the kind of green you can breathe in. Atenas sits at around 700 meters above sea level, tucked into the western edge of the valley where the Pacific moisture meets the mountain ridges.
Long sunny days that rarely push above 87 degrees, nights that cool into the mid-sixties. The air feels different here. Lighter. Then the road climbs, and you see it.
The Retreat Costa Rica is tucked high on a 60-acre quartz mountain above it all. Diana Stobo founded this 25-room boutique wellness resort in 2016, and since my last visit, a $4 million expansion called Santosha Wellness Club has added new lofts, restaurants and communal gathering spaces rooted in the Sanskrit concept of contentment.
I came back to see what had changed. What I found was that the thing I remembered most, the sense of community, had only gotten stronger.
What I Found the First Time
As I pulled up, it split me between two timelines. The version of myself who first came here four years ago, and the person I have become since. Places hold memory that way. Coming back felt like meeting both versions of myself at once, humbled by the distance between them.
The first time, I came the way most people do: in search of something. I wanted quiet. I wanted my body to feel safe in my own skin. Yoga and meditation had become part of my practice, and this was my first solo trip to a new country. The usual anxieties flooded in. Would anyone talk to me? Will I have to eat alone? Will the staff think I’m lonely?
On my first morning, people were asking me to join their table. Not out of obligation, but genuine care to connect. A woman in her sixties gave this experience to her sister. A couple in their thirties on their first trip without the kids. A group of friends who had met on a retreat somewhere else entirely and kept finding reasons to travel together.
We talked about the things we were working through, the things we were letting go of and the things we were beginning to understand about ourselves.
How This Healing Retreat in Costa Rica Is Designed for Connection
That first visit planted something. So when I returned this year and walked through the expanded grounds, I paid closer attention to why this place works the way it does. No pre-planned itinerary can prepare you for what unfolds here.
Shared silence on the meditation deck. A conversation that begins over breakfast and resurfaces during evening yoga. An invitation to join a table with someone you’ve never met, extended so naturally you almost forget you arrived alone.
I felt it on that first trip, before Santosha Wellness Club existed. The original footprint already had this quality, something in the air, in the way the spaces opened into each other. A space that invites you to lower your guard and check your ego upon arrival.
As guests returned season after season, a pattern emerged. Strangers were becoming friends. People arrived alone and left with plans for a reunion. The healing wasn’t only happening in the spa or on the meditation deck. It was happening at the dinner table, on the hiking trails, in easy conversation between people who had nothing in common except the decision to show up for themselves.
Stobo noticed this shift as the community grew. The grounds had been shaped by the feng shui philosophy of Architectural Digest expert David Cho to encourage flow and openness, infused with selenite crystals said to clear negative energy, filled with rooms that have no televisions, no phones and no agenda beyond your own.
Stobo recognized that the design was creating conditions for both individual and collective healing. That distinction became the heartbeat of everything to come.
Meet Santosha
When I returned this year, The Retreat had grown into the vision Stobo had been building toward. Santosha Wellness Club sits on the hillside beneath the canopy of an enormous Guanacaste tree, decorated with ancient indigenous relics and vintage pottery.
An infinity pool with a mosaic design. A yoga shala with 16-foot ceilings, fabric-lined walls and backlit mirrors that create a visual lightness during morning vinyasa, afternoon sound healing and evening restorative class.
Santosha Lofts face west toward the Pacific in soft cream, warm taupe and handcrafted stone. Natural teak furnishings, old-world doors carved by local artisans, private balconies, a chandelier suspended above the tub and an oversized bathroom window framing the Nicoya Peninsula. You can watch the sunset while you shower.
In Sanskrit, santosha means contentment. The radical acceptance of where you are, who you are and what is. I watched that word play out in real time during my visit.
A family reuniting after two decades of separation, sharing laughs and pulling me into the conversation. A young couple exchanging bites of dessert. Sisters relaxing poolside before their individual spa sessions. Community coming together and branching apart in perfect harmony.
The Table That Includes Everyone
The resort’s main restaurant, Sol Terrace, has had its own expansion since my last visit, with booths overlooking the mountains and the regenerative farm. An open kitchen policy means you can watch your food being prepared, ask questions, take a cooking class and understand not just what you’re eating but why. The farm that supplies 80 percent of the produce grows steps away. Food becomes a shared language. The table becomes common ground.
Executive Chef Sergio Lopez leads the culinary program alongside acclaimed Costa Rican chef Pablo Bonilla, who spent over a decade researching traditional indigenous cooking techniques through the Jirondai Project. What arrives on your plate is not just nourishment. It is culture, a way of tasting the land you are standing on.
Every menu is dairy-free, gluten-free and free of refined sugars, not as a compromise but as a philosophy. For those who have spent years scanning ingredient lists and making special requests that still miss the mark, eating here feels like exhaling. Nothing to negotiate. The food is made for everyone at the table.
That same philosophy carries into the newer dining spaces. Mystique sits beneath lush greenery with sweeping views in every direction. A highlight was the eight-course tasting menu, which traces Costa Rica’s landscapes and traditions through each dish.
House-made breads from chickpea, corn and cassava give way to a nourishing broth and a series of layered courses moving through ocean, coastline and fire, before ending with a reimagined churro.
For something more casual, La Diosa is an open-air lounge that brings cooking aromas and mountainside views. These are places to linger, to talk, to let the meal become the reason you stayed at the table longer than you planned.
Where the Private Work Happens
Community runs through every corner of this healing retreat, but some moments are meant to be yours alone. Vida Mia Healing Center & Spa spans 8,000 square feet of treatment rooms opening onto mountain views, filled with remedies made from herbs grown on the grounds. More than 80 treatments, scrubs, tinctures and oil infusions made in-house from organic ingredients, are intimate by nature.
The silence of the meditation deck at dawn is yours to fill with whatever you need: prayer, breath, nothing at all. The inner work is your own.
But the moment you step back into the wider world of the retreat, you remember that everyone around you is doing the same thing, each in their own way, each at their own pace.
That is the Retreat effect. Design meeting nature meeting the radical act of putting people in proximity to one another with nothing to perform and nowhere to be. Just unfiltered, authentic connection.
What Community Actually Feels Like
Wellness is not something meant to be achieved in isolation. It happens between people who come together to witness one another’s evolution, whether over a few days or the reunion after a few years.
Diana Stobo built a healing retreat that understands this at a cellular level, a place where the land, the food, the rooms, the programming and the people who show up are all connected.
Contentment, it turns out, is not something you find inside yourself and then guard carefully. It becomes visible only in relation to others. That is what The Retreat Costa Rica gives you. Not just a place to heal. A place to belong.
Photos courtesy Emily Hill & The Retreat Costa Rica
Snapshot
- Experience a healing retreat in Costa Rica built around community, not isolation, where strangers share meals, stories and yoga mats and leave with plans to reunite.
- Walk into The Retreat Costa Rica’s newly expanded campus, Santosha, with 26,500 square feet of new wellness space, ten luxury lofts and three farm-driven restaurants woven into a mountaintop above the Pacific.
- Eat without compromise at every table on the grounds, where dairy-free, gluten-free and refined-sugar-free menus are the standard, not the exception, and 80 percent of the produce grows steps from the kitchen.
- Go deep in the Vida Mía spa on your own terms, with 80-plus treatments made from herbs and ingredients grown on-site, then step back into a community doing the same inner work at their own pace.
- Understand why the design itself drives connection, from feng shui-informed architecture and TV-free rooms to open gathering spaces that make it easy to show up as yourself.
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