Ask anyone who has lived on the peninsula longer than a season, and they will tell you the same quiet truth: for most of its history, Peninsula Papagayo has functioned less like one community and more like three adjoining ones. If you were a Four Seasons homeowner, your dinners defaulted to Virador Beach Club or the steakhouse Nemare, and your golf ran through the Golf Clubhouse's Har-Tru courts. If you were an Andaz owner, your world orbited Chao Pescao and Ostra. When Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, opened its doors, it arrived with its own signature restaurant, Puna, helmed by Chef Diego Muñoz, and its own gravitational pull. Three resorts, three social ecosystems, one peninsula.
That changed in December 2025, when Papagayo Park opened. It is easy to file this under routine amenity news, another line in a long list of resort upgrades. But the more interesting story is what the park actually does to the shape of a typical week here. For the first time, there is a piece of infrastructure on the peninsula that does not belong to any single resort. It belongs to the peninsula itself, and residents from all three properties are now showing up to the same courts, the same lawn, and the same gelateria at the same time.
The Old Map of the Peninsula
Before the park, access to organized recreation ran almost entirely through resort or club affiliation. The original Peninsula Papagayo Club, the one tied to the golf operation, offered three tennis courts and three pickleball courts on clay-like Har-Tru surfaces. Golf membership itself was, and remains, intentionally scarce: for the 2026 calendar year, dues run $35,000 annually, and the club caps total membership at 350. That scarcity was part of the appeal, but it also meant your social circle on the peninsula tended to sort itself by which clubhouse you belonged to.
Dining followed the same logic. A homeowner near Andaz would default to Gaio or Ostra without much reason to cross over to the Four Seasons side for Nemare or Virador Beach Club, and vice versa. Even the beach clubs split along resort lines, with Prieta Beach Club's Olas and Manglar serving one crowd and Casa de Playa serving another. The peninsula was never small in acreage, at 1,400 acres, but it behaved like a series of separate neighborhoods with a shared zip code.
What Actually Opened in December
Papagayo Park is a 23-acre, $26 million project designed by the landscape architecture firm EDSA and developed by Mohari Hospitality and Gencom, the same partnership behind the peninsula's Four Seasons, Nekajui, and Andaz properties. Unlike the golf clubhouse or any single resort's beach club, the park was built explicitly for members and guests across all three properties. It sits near the Enclaves at Nacascolo Bay, and it was designed as connective tissue rather than another private amenity.
The numbers tell part of the story. Before the park, the peninsula's total racquet sports footprint was three tennis courts and three pickleball courts, with no padel at all. After the park, the total across the peninsula is eight tennis courts, split between four Har-Tru clay courts at the golf clubhouse and four Rebound Ace hard courts at the park, plus six pickleball courts and two padel courts. Padel, often described as the fastest-growing racquet sport globally, simply did not exist here before the park opened. It does now, and the opening celebrations included a clinic hosted by Roby Gattiker, an 11-time world padel champion, giving early members a chance to learn the game from someone who has actually mastered it.
Beyond the courts, the park includes a pump track for bikes, scooters, and skateboards, described by the resort as a first-of-its-kind amenity here, a dog park, a light-filled art studio, a lap pool, a kids' adventure zone with a splash area and playground, and the Espira wellness shala perched above it all for classes and sunset gatherings. Patio Social, a casual restaurant and bar, and Cono Loco, a gelateria, anchor the social side of the park just steps from the pool.
Francesca Poddie, the peninsula's chief operating officer and EVP of development, put the intent behind the project simply:
"Wake up, run seven miles, then go surfing, and meet your friend for paddleball."
That is not a description of a single resort's offering. It is a description of a day that moves freely across the whole peninsula, which is exactly the point.
The Restaurant Count Finally Reflects the Whole Peninsula
Dining has followed a similar arc. With Nekajui's arrival, the peninsula's own accounting now puts the total at sixteen signature restaurants, up from a number that used to be discussed almost entirely in terms of which resort you were dining at. Chao Pescao, long an Andaz favorite for shared plates and craft cocktails, added a new stage at the back of the restaurant in late 2025 and is leaning into live Latin and Caribbean bands, positioning itself as the peninsula's evening music spot rather than just a dinner reservation. Gaio, a trattoria-style newcomer, brought Italian comfort food into the mix. Palapita, tucked at the Tennis Centre, pours Costa Rican street food alongside beer from Papagayo Brewery, a genuinely local pairing that did not exist in this form before. And for anyone willing to take the seasonal detour, Meso operates out on Nacascolo beach at Casa de Playa, reachable by a shuttle that runs through mangroves at dusk, dinner service running roughly mid-November through April.
None of these restaurants required the park to exist. But the park gives residents a reason to treat the whole dining map as one system instead of three separate ones tied to wherever they happen to own. Patio Social, sitting inside the park itself, is dining that belongs to no resort in particular, which makes it the closest thing the peninsula has to neutral ground.
What an Actual Week Looks Like Now
The practical effect shows up in how a week gets spent rather than in any single amenity. A resident might now move through something like this:
- A morning pickleball or padel session at the park's Racquet Center, mixing with neighbors from Four Seasons, Andaz, and Nekajui alike
- Lunch at Patio Social or Palapita, both of which sit outside any one resort's dining program
- An afternoon round at the Arnold Palmer Signature Ocean Course, still the peninsula's original anchor and ranked among Golf Digest's Top 100 Courses Outside the United States
- Dinner rotating between Puna, Gaio, Chao Pescao during a live music night, or Virador Beach Club depending on the mood
- A weekend evening at Cono Loco with kids fresh off the pump track, or a mangrove shuttle out to Meso for something quieter
None of this was impossible before December 2025. But it required more intention, more crossing of what felt like informal borders. The park did not add a single new resort. It added the connective space that makes moving between them feel unremarkable, which is precisely what turns a collection of separate resort communities into something that functions like one town.
That shift matters if you already call this place home. It means the pickleball partner you meet this month might live on the opposite side of the peninsula from where you do. It means the restaurant you default to on a Tuesday might not be the one tied to your own building anymore. The geography did not get smaller. The reasons to stay inside your own corner of it did.
If you are already living on the peninsula and want a clearer read on how these changes are shaping the community around you, or if a friend or family member has started asking what it is actually like to spend a season here, the team at ACT Costa Rica spends its time on this exact stretch of coastline and is always glad to talk through what we are seeing. Request a Private Consultation whenever the timing feels right.
