ORIGIN STORIES

Think of a visit to Costa Rica, and you'll probably imagine ziplines and eco-lodges. But there's a deeper way to interact with this environment: through the Indigenous communities that have called it home for centuries.

- Tim Neville

A FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME that traveling well means ending up in a stranger's kitchen, and this one certainly proved his point. The room was open, a three-walled haven cooled by a breeze that sifted through the guava trees outside. It was a warm, sticky evening in the jungle of Térraba, an Indigenous territory in southern Costa Rica. A dinner table with a checkered blue cloth held plates of fire-roasted pork, peach palm, and ice-cold bottles of tamarind juice.

Suddenly, a loud ping rang off the roof, startling me. "That's a nance," explained our host, Jeffrey Villanueva. "Have you tried it?" His mother, Eulalia, offered a handful of the yellow, almond-size berries, which had been harvested just feet away from her kitchen. When I took a bite, the tangy flavor was electrifying. Sensing my delight, Villanueva showed me star fruit, water apples, and four types of lemons a tiny sample of the 25 types of fruits and vegetables he grows on the 47-acre farm that has fed his family for centuries. The culinary coup came later, with a warm chocolate drink, made from cacao that he grows on the property and crushes on a 2,000-year-old table-size millstone.

"We are trying to preserve what our ancestors left us," Villanueva said in Spanish. He is Brörán, a member of a 6,000-person-strong matriarchal community fighting to keep its traditions alive amid local discrimination and land disputes. Foods like these, grown in the soil worked by his forebears, serve as threads to the past. "This is me," he said. "This is my culture."

How many travelers dream of going to Costa Rica to surf, raft, and hike among the toucans, sloths, and monkeys? The country's devotion to conservation is legendary: a power grid crackling with nothing but green energy, wildlife-forward laws, and a new policy prohibiting single-use plastics in its 29 national parks.