Back to the Roots
An authentic Costa Rican Eco Spa

all photographs © Nicolay Kreidler 2007

Vanessa Jensen, recent Spa College graduate heads up the Eco Spa at Tierra de Milagros on the Osa Peninsula in the southwest corner of Costa Rica.

A 45-minute plane ride from San Jose or an 8-hour car trip along winding roads takes you into the Osa with it’s national parks, thick jungle, rivers, flora and fauna featuring only-here-to-be-found species once abundant throughout Central America.

Here is also Tierra de Milagros a rustic retreat center catering already for many years to workshops (especially yoga), with ocean front platforms and pleine-air accommodation.

Enter the Spa at Tierra. Not your usual spa at all, in fact one might even want to resist comparing it to any mainstream definition of spa and seek a more primal word for it deserves to be in a class of its own.

Now in her third season, Vanessa has developed an astonishing selection of spa treatments that are pure to their core. Not only are the ingredients sourced from the surrounding waters and land, but they are harvested on a daily basis so that they are packed with life force suggesting an association with the energy and vitality of raw foods more than a cosmetic experience.

By delivering the product fresh, still dripping from the rainforest the utmost potency of each component is a key to a down to earth experience. The no frills yet abundantly luxurious treatments cannot be compared to anything out of a bottle. With the elements coming directly from source, their inherent information is absorbed on a homeopathic and naturopathic level while original fragrances please the senses and the pulsating environment does the rest.

Treatments are designed a la minute and while suggestions lure, no treatment is ever like another. A coconut-ginger wrap can be washed away by coconut milk made from freshly grated coconut flesh laced with freshly picked ylang ylang blossoms while the feet take a cacao-cinnamon scrub and are rinsed in spring water.

Or a blend of aloe vera from the garden with cooling cucumber can soothe the skin after a day on the water with a botanical hair rinse regenerating hair and head alike with sweet-smelling substances that then again become naturally part of the environment as they wash off into the Earth.

Another world and level of sourcing that many can only dream of unfolds here and bringing this closer to the visitor by facilitating a direct experience is providing an unforgettable understanding, activating cellular memories of when this was once our second nature.

Originally hired to manage the retreat center where she has established her spa services, Vanessa, quickly realized that her true calling was to develop unique spa experiences that literally emerge out of the surrounding jungle and just as quickly disappear back into it without a trace except for the feeling of having been touched by something very special.

Vanessa Jensen’s approach can be compared to the discipline of the finest chefs who will go where the ingredients are at their freshest and finest. She trails up the river to seek out clay that she pulverizes and connects with local growers. She picks the flowers from the land and gets exotic fruit right off the tree.

Living in the abundant supply of natural fruit enzymes (as in papaya), fragrant emollients (as in coconut milk), moisturizers such as wild honey and a virtuous arrangement of fragrant flowers distilled into essences from Frangipani to Ylang Ylang, as well as the Osa clay that is plucked from the river bordering the retreat, Vanessa’s daily ritual begins with harvesting, collecting, grating, rasping, slicing, blending and pulverizing ingredients that she combines for each client individually to enhance their particular moment in time.

She then proceeds to lay out an arrangement of freshly harvested banana leaves and fragrant flowers on the wooden floor of her spa cabana that serves as a 100% eco-friendly bed,  ready to drape and wrap the lucky person about to receive one of her tropical treats.

Treatments include body scrubs, wraps and masques featuring ingredients ranging from ground local cacao beans and of course famous Costa Rican coffee through to Osa mud enhanced with numerous fruits such as bananas, papayas, limes, oranges as well as flowers that we usually know only from the labels of essential oils.

A Costa Rican coffee scrub generously exfoliates the skin leaving it smooth, fragrant and fresh ready to rinsed with river water be bathed in scented coconut milk

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Nicolay Kreidler is an instructor at Touching from the Heart and a facilitator at Spa College. He is an active consultant to the spa industry with iSpad.

You can also reach Nicolay at nicolay@ispad.net