From NYC to Nosara: One Family's Story

The Carrillo family — Marcus, Elena, and their two daughters, Sofía (14) and Camila (11) — made the decision to leave New York in the kitchen of their Crown Heights apartment at 11:30 PM on a Tuesday in February 2024. Marcus had just finished his fourth consecutive 14-hour day. Elena had been on a call with her sister in Miami about their mother's health. The girls were asleep. And they looked at each other across the kitchen island and said, simultaneously, the same three words. "We should go."

The Fear Inventory

"The list of things we were afraid of was basically a list of every cliché about moving abroad," Marcus told us when we spoke in Nosara eighteen months later, sitting on the porch of the house they now own outright, looking at the jungle that has replaced the Crown Heights sidewalk as their morning view. "Healthcare. The girls' education. Whether our careers could survive the move. Whether we were romanticizing something that was actually going to be hard. Whether we'd miss New York so much it would poison everything."

They spent six months researching before making any commitments. They read every forum post, watched every YouTube channel, hired a relocation consultant who had made the move from Toronto fifteen years earlier. They visited Nosara for two weeks, enrolled the girls in trial sessions at the local bilingual school, attended a community meeting about road maintenance, and had dinner with four different families who had made the move from major US cities. "We were looking for reasons to say no," Elena says. "We couldn't find enough of them."

"The first morning I walked to the beach with the girls before school and realized that this was just going to be a Tuesday — that's when I knew," Elena told us. "In New York, a Tuesday morning was something to survive. Here it was something to look forward to."

The Surprises

Some surprises were wonderful. The school — Nosara's bilingual academy — turned out to be genuinely excellent, with class sizes of sixteen and a faculty that includes teachers who chose Nosara specifically so their own children could grow up here. Sofía's Spanish, which had been textbook-perfect and conversationally rigid, became fluent in four months. Camila made her first Tico friend in the second week and has not looked back.

Some surprises were hard. The roads in the rainy season are an experience that Marcus describes as "character building." The internet, despite advances, still hiccups during storms. There are days when the nearest decent hardware store is an hour away and you need a part today. "But here's the thing," Marcus says. "Every single time something like that happens, I ask myself: would I trade it to go back? And the answer is so fast it almost surprises me. No. No, I would not."

Where They Are Now

Eighteen months in, Marcus runs his product management consultancy remotely for clients in New York, London, and Singapore — "actually more clients than before, because the quality of my work got better when I wasn't commuting three hours a day." Elena has launched a small side business doing bilingual content strategy for real estate brands in Latin America. The girls surf three mornings a week before school. The family has not eaten a meal in front of a television since they arrived. They own a dog named Ola.

"We were afraid of so many things," Elena says, watching Camila chase Ola across the grass toward the garden gate. "And almost none of them happened. The things that were actually hard were things we could never have predicted. And the good parts — we couldn't have predicted those either. We just had to get here to find out."