Hacienda AltaGracia Review: Blue Zone Wellness & Longevity in Costa Rica

Greece is home to five designated Blue Zones – Ikaria, an island where the inhabitants forget to die, where the food is wild vegetables and local wine and the social contract is important: show up unannounced, stay for dinner and don’t leave until you feel like it. I am Greek. This should give me the authority to live longer. It doesn’t. My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to be 91, but she was also an occasional smoker and spent her formative years breathing the air of Athens in the 1980s and ’90s, which was a little Mediterranean postcard and diesel soup. What my family shared with Ikaria was a really important part: the table. Dinner took hours. The coffee later took a long time. No one was eating alone and no one was in a hurry to be somewhere else. I grew up within that rhythm without thinking of it as a lifelong habit. It was the way the Greeks I knew lived.

So when the invitation came to experience it Estée Lauder Skin Longevity Institute at Hacienda AltaGracia—the Auberge Collection in the Costa Rican village of Pérez Zeledón, near the Nicoya Peninsula, one of those Green Zones—my conscience was skeptical. Longevity, in my experience, was not something you pursued. It was something that happened to you when you ate well, you loved it and didn’t spend too much time alone. My grandmother did not live until she was 91 because of the serum. He lived a long time as he had a table full of people every night and was not where he was supposed to be the next morning. What I didn’t count is a place that fits that premise perfectly—where the food is pulled from the garden that morning, when horseback riding in the lowlands doubles as equine therapy, when the professor reads tension in your jaw the way a doctor reads a chart—and allows you to come to your own conclusions.

The property sits on 180 acres at the foot of the Talamanca Mountains, and the first thing it does is make a case for the wind. I want to explain it well, but I’m not sure I’ve earned the right. It’s pure the way spring water is pure—not the absence of something but the presence of something else, something your lungs notice before your brain gets involved. The Casa de Agua spa has the first Estée Lauder Skin Longevity Institute in America, and the science behind it—15 years of research, patented longevity technology—is real. But here’s what separates it from all the so-called collaborations I’ve encountered: the world did the work long before the product arrived. The communities around Pérez Zeledón have been living in the industrial world for generations, and the evidence is not in the lab report. It’s the way people move here, the way they eat and the speed with which they let the day go by.

A 30-minute charter from San José landed me at the hacienda’s private airport on Saturday afternoon. In the evening I was out at El Cultivo, the resort’s garden kitchen, sharing a table with a so-called astrologer. Rebecca Gordon and eating a vegan diet that kept surprising me. Gordon ran an astronomy school in New York for nearly two decades and his insistence on making the practice interdisciplinary has landed him keynotes and team-building sessions at Google, Meta and NYU—organizations not known for trusting anything they can’t count. That he keeps getting invited again means more than any guarantees.

My relationship with astrology has always been casual—my mother is a devout believer and I grew up hearing enough to be curious without being fully committed. Our little group sat under a starry sky as Gordon kindly explained: before he mapped out the coming year in any detail, he asked each of us to hold a secret question in our minds, and then threw a set of dice whose numbers, he said, contained the answer. I will not share what I requested. But I had just become a first-time homeowner, and the financial cycles that came with it were going through everything. I left that table convinced.

Gordon, however, was part of something bigger. Hacienda AltaGracia runs a rotating Masters in Residence program at Casa de Agua that brings doctors to the area for multi-day stays throughout the year—astrologers, facialists, fascia specialists, nutritionists, movement teachers. Past residents have included The Class founder Taryn Toomey and nutritionist Mia Rigden; Upcoming sessions feature fascia specialist Bonnie Crotzer and yoga practitioner Annie Moves. The model means that longevity here is not a set menu but a living one, and it gives you a reason to come back that has nothing to do with pool daybeds—though those are pretty cool too.

The next morning I surrendered to Casa de Agua and he generously returned it to me. I opted for Hierbas y Flores, a signature treatment built around freshly picked native herbs and flowers that begins with a deep abdominal massage—rejuvenating an organ, dispersing energy, the kind of language I would have lost a year ago—before working on the full body, stretching muscles and opening things I didn’t know were blocked. The spa begins with what amounts to its own mini-tour: experiential showers that range from tropical showers to jets, then clay treatments on heated stone beds around the pool. One treatment everyone has told me not to miss happens completely outside the spa area: a river bath, a two-hour soak in a secret river pool that includes aura cleansing, coffee scrubbing and herbal infusions. The heavy rain the day before had other plans. I was more disappointed than I expected, which tells you that this place quickly returns expectations.

The consolation was the second session with Gordon. That afternoon he presented the full analysis of the year before that he had teased at dinner, this time in an outdoor yoga position with the Talamanca range in the background. His extensive reading of 2026 was impressive: Uranus changing signs for the first time in seven years, bringing what he described as a collective reset to the way we think about health, technology and the body. Jupiter transiting Cancer means a year that rewards people who invest in home, family and put down roots. He went through each sign with the patience of someone who has been studying these cycles for twenty years and truly believes that the patterns are there. When he arrived in Capricorn—mine, with a rising Leo moon and a Leo moon that was clearly pleasing him—the forecast came down to something so encouraging it felt like a cheap concession from the universe: a banner financial year starting in June, a solar eclipse in February opening a new income and a seven-year cycle of health renewal through my submission to that health sector. I wrote every word down like a person taking directions to a destination.

It was Monday Joomee’s song. Song is a celebrity who uses her facial technique, Kaika—Japanese for “blooming”—not with your skin but with the makeup of your face. He felt my jaw and temporal muscles with his hand, diagnostically, without saying a word, and within a minute he had called for the persistent curling I was unconsciously doing. What he explains next makes the treatment click: chronic jaw tension compresses the muscles surrounding the lymphatic system, the only way to drain water from the face. When those muscles become blocked, the lymph cannot pump properly, leading to puffiness, sinus congestion and a face that looks much heavier than it should be. Using targeted Shiatsu pressure and acupressure along the masseter, under the cheekbones and around the orbital muscles, she released years of tension I didn’t know I was harboring. As the muscles softened, the drainage channels opened. Within 20 minutes the clenching had resolved, my sinuses were gone and the face in the mirror looked truly rested—noticeably slimmer and dreamy. It went on for days.

Then there is the food, which encompasses the entire philosophy. El Cultivo, a local chef’s garden, grows what the kitchen is cooking. Great chefs come from the village with the dedication of people who believe that intimacy is smell. Grano, the signature restaurant, serves plates that taste like the particular hill from which they originate—salted, boiled, grilled over wood, all dishes arriving with a kind of quiet authority. Cienfuegos is a weekly dinner where meat is cooked over a coconut husk flame while horses do a rodeo in the ring nearby, a sentence I never expected to write and a night I would happily stay inside again. Grandma would quickly understand this kitchen—the same belief that good food is not a luxury but a form of respect. The proof of this property is in the picadillo as it is in any patented technology.

Here’s what I’m going to tell you. If you’ve tried supplements and trackers and protocols and still feel like there’s something important waiting for you to slow down long enough to see it, go for it. I flew to a village in Costa Rica where people live longer than anyone in the world, and I let a facialist restore my face and an astrologer light up my year, and I ate food that tasted like no other place, and I came home with something I didn’t have when I left. Not to fix. The beginning. The Greeks, it turns out, don’t have the energy to live well. We just show up at the table first.