ISLA SAN LUCAS, Costa Rica | In Costa Rica, the dismal prison island of San Lucas has been transformed into a tourist paradise with a natural park and wild beaches.
A stone’s throw from the coast of the Gulf of Nicoya, on the Pacific coast, the island of San Lucas was until now notorious for its prison where inmates were subjected to inhuman conditions of detention, even torture, from 1873. until it closed in 1991.
Abandoned, the prison was classified as a national heritage in 1995, and the island declared a nature reserve in 2001. This year, in August, San Lucas has definitely found a new destiny, more cheerful, with its opening to tourists, despite the restrictions imposed by the health crisis of the new coronavirus.
Since last year, several public bodies have been working to rehabilitate the old prison island by tracing paths to discover its natural beauties and its fauna, while the old penitentiary was fitted out to open it to visitors. .
Claudia Dobles, wife of President Carlos Alvarado, who has the official Costa Rican title of First Lady, has been at the forefront of the successful completion of the rehabilitation project, with a total budget of $ 2.4 million .
“San Lucas is a spectacular, cultural, historical, architectural place (with) beaches, biodiversity … It is the best kept treasure in the Pacific” Costa Rican, praises the First Lady.
Early in its 117-year prison facility, San Lucas was used to jail politicians deemed “undesirable” by the then military government of President Tomas Guardia (1870-1876 and 1877-1882).
The establishment then became a high security prison where the most violent criminals in the country were held.
Twinning
One of its famous prisoners, the Costa Rican writer José Leon Sanchez, was in prison for ten years. In an autobiographical novel, “The Island of Lonely Men”, published in 1963 and brought to the screen in 1974 in Mexico, he revealed the mistreatment, lack of food and rape between inmates that took place in the prison. .
The seven high security cells were distributed around a circular courtyard in the center of which a pit covered with a grid served as a dungeon for prisoners who had tried to escape, describes the novelist. It was so dreaded that the inmates would have preferred to die rather than spend even a day there, according to the writer.
The terrible story of the penitentiary can always be read on the walls of its cells, where the prisoners left graffiti, very often obsessively sexual. An inmate, however, left a trace of his passion by drawing a footballer wearing the Brazilian yellow jersey.
Because of their similar histories, the Costa Rican government plans to strike a twinning deal with Alcatraz Prison Island, whose ominous silhouette stands out against San Francisco Bay, California.
At the bend of the paths, which cover the 500 hectares of San Lucas, you will discover the remains of the first prison quarters in the middle of the forest. From now on, the howls of the monkeys replace the cries of pain or despair of the convicts.
Indeed, “here we find a great biodiversity”, boasts to AFP Giovany Mora, a forest ranger who has worked on the island for 14 years.
“We see a lot of white-tailed deer, squirrels, iguanas, agoutis, pacas” (large rodents from the tropics and subtropics), he proudly lists.
Health crisis obliges, tourism on the old island-prison is however limited to weekends and for only three rotations per day. Visitors, subject to preventive health measures, can only disembark in groups of 40 maximum and are prohibited from swimming on the beaches.
Despite all these restrictions, the island received in August 920 visitors, practically all Costa Ricans, in the almost total absence of foreigners due to pandemic, according to the Tourism Chamber of the Port of Puntarenas, hence we embark for San Lucas.