Hacienda AltaGracia is an Auberge Collection property in Costa Rica’s Pérez Zeledón valley.

Greece is home to one of the planet’s five designated Blue Zones—Ikaria, the island where residents famously forget to die, where the diet is wild greens and local wine and the social contract is essentially: show up unannounced, stay for dinner and don’t leave until you feel like it. I am half-Greek. This should make me an authority on longevity. It does not. My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to 91, but she also smoked occasionally and spent her formative decades breathing the Athens air of the 1980s and ’90s, which was less Mediterranean postcard and more diesel-flavored soup. What my family did share with Ikaria was the part that actually matters: the table. Dinner took hours. Coffee afterward took longer. Nobody ate alone and nobody was in any particular hurry to be anywhere else. I grew up inside that rhythm without ever thinking of it as a longevity practice. It was just how the Greeks I knew lived.

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So when an invitation arrived to experience the Estée Lauder Skin Longevity Institute at Hacienda AltaGracia—an Auberge Collection property in Costa Rica’s Pérez Zeledón valley, adjacent to the Nicoya Peninsula, another of those Blue Zones—my instinct was polite suspicion. Longevity, in my experience, was not something you pursued. It was something that happened to you if you ate well, loved loudly and didn’t spend too much time alone. My grandmother did not live to 91 because of a serum. She lived as long as she did because she had a table full of people every night and nowhere to be the next morning. What I had not accounted for was a place that agrees with that premise entirely—where the food is pulled from the garden that morning, where a horseback ride through the foothills doubles as equine therapy, where a facialist reads the tension in your jaw the way a doctor reads a chart—and lets you arrive at the conclusion yourself.

The property sits on 180 acres in the foothills of the Talamanca Mountains, and the first thing it does is make a case with the air. I want to describe it properly, but I am not sure I have earned the right.........

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