Three centuries before wealthy investors sought out trophy holdings along Costa Rica’s untamed Pacific coast, these shores were a theater of conquistadors, corsairs and cannon fire. For much of the late 17th century, Spanish merchant ships laden with the riches of the Americas sailed the Gulf of Nicoya under constant threat from English and French privateers.

The spoils were plentiful. Merchant galleons coursing into the port of Caldera would be groaning with cacao, tobacco, livestock and hardwoods, transported down by mule from the transit hub of Esparza in the mountain basin above.

One of Costa Rica’s oldest colonial towns, Esparza served as a treasure vault for the vast haul transported across the Spanish Empire. But its lack of fortifications left it perennially vulnerable to plunder. The final devastating raid by English buccaneers in 1686 left the outpost stripped of the very riches that had invited its ruin.

Fortunes sailed away to Europe 300 years ago. But in a delicious paradox, one eventually returned—anchored permanently on the ridge as El Castillo de Esparza.

The castle moniker invokes brooding keeps, defensive towers and forbidding stone. Relics of a bygone age of feudalism, folklore and fairytales. Not so El Castillo de Esparza. Instead, what unfolds as you approach under the canopy of native palms is a near four-acre Mediterranean-style estate of low-slung terracotta roofs, sun-washed stucco, and tropical gardens buffed by cool breezes.

The Countess And The Castle

Built in the early 1980s,........

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