L’acqua Viva Resort thrives in a Costa Rica Blue Zone
Did you know that L’acqua Viva Resort & Spa in Costa Rica is located in a Blue Zone? That doesn’t mean people are blue or depressed here. Rather, it means this is a place for long life.
The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, where L’acqua Viva Resort is located, is a special place known as a Blue Zone. People in this northwest region of Costa Rica in Central America are more than twice as likely as people in the United States to reach a healthy age of at least 90.
U.S. author and researcher Dan Buettner popularized the term “Blue Zone” in his 2008 book, “The Blue Zones”, based on his research with National Geographic and the world’s top longevity scientists to identify places around the world where people live measurably longer and better. After identifying five of the world’s Blue Zones, they found that people there reach age 100 at rates 10 times greater than in the United States.
The name “Blue Zones” comes from a 2004 demographic study called “Identification of a Geographic Area Characterized by Extreme Longevity in the Sardinia Island: the AKEA study” (Experimental Gerontology by Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, among other authors). The study identified Sardinia’s Barbagia region as having a very high concentration of men over age 100. As the authors discovered more clusters of long longevity in the world, they began drawing blue circles around them on maps, referring to the areas as “Blue Zones.”