Costa Rica

Both towns in this collection sit on the Nicoya Peninsula, one of the world's five Blue Zones — places where people measurably outlive the global average — and neither has done much paving on the way there. Nosara runs on red dirt roads under a development code that has kept it low-rise for thirty years; Santa Teresa sits at the end of a long unpaved road on the peninsula's southwestern tip, jungle on one side and the Pacific on the other. The surf is warm-water and generous. Playa Guiones works on almost any swell from any direction and holds a wave count high enough that forty people in the water never quite feels like a crowd, while Santa Teresa runs from its main beach through Playa Hermosa down to Mal País. The water holds 26 to 30 degrees all year. Nobody owns a wetsuit.

The yoga is not an amenity here — it is the older culture. The Nosara Yoga Institute has been running teacher trainings since 1992, a decade before the surf scene matured around it, and Santa Teresa's shalas arrived alongside its waves rather than after them. December through April is dry, offshore, and reliable; May through November brings the more consistent swell and the thinner lineups; May and November are the consensus picks. The hotels in this collection split across both towns — and a four-wheel drive matters more than it looks like it should.