I Went to a Costa Rican Blue Zone to Reverse Time. My Face—and the Stars—Had Other Ideas
Greece is home to one of the planet’s five designated Blue Zones—Ikaria, the island where residents famously forget to die, where the diet is wild greens and local wine and the social contract is essentially: show up unannounced, stay for dinner and don’t leave until you feel like it. I am half-Greek. This should make me an authority on longevity. It does not. My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to 91, but she also smoked occasionally and spent her formative decades breathing the Athens air of the 1980s and ’90s, which was less Mediterranean postcard and more diesel-flavored soup. What my family did share with Ikaria was the part that actually matters: the table. Dinner took hours. Coffee afterward took longer. Nobody ate alone and nobody was in any particular hurry to be anywhere else. I grew up inside that rhythm without ever thinking of it as a longevity practice. It was just how the Greeks I knew lived.
So when an invitation arrived to experience the Estée Lauder Skin Longevity Institute at Hacienda AltaGracia—an Auberge Collection property in Costa Rica’s Pérez Zeledón valley, adjacent to the Nicoya Peninsula, another of those Blue Zones—my instinct was polite suspicion. Longevity, in my experience, was not something you pursued. It was something that happened to you if you ate well, loved loudly and didn’t spend too much time alone. My grandmother did not live to 91 because of a serum. She lived as long as she did because she had a table full of people every night and nowhere to be the next morning. What I had not accounted for was a place that agrees with that premise entirely—where the food is pulled from the garden that morning, where a horseback ride through the foothills doubles as equine therapy, where a facialist reads the tension in your jaw the way a doctor reads a chart—and lets you arrive at the conclusion yourself.
The property sits on 180 acres in the foothills of the Talamanca Mountains, and the first thing it does is make a case with the air. I want to describe it properly, but I am not sure I have earned the right. It is clean the way spring water is clean—not the absence of something but the presence of something else, something your lungs recognize before your brain catches up. The resort’s Casa de Agua spa houses Estée Lauder’s first Skin Longevity Institute in the Americas, and the science behind it—15 years of research, a patented longevity technology—is real. But here is what separates it from every branded wellness partnership I have encountered: the land was doing the work long before the brand arrived. The surrounding communities in Pérez Zeledón have been outliving the industrialized world for generations, and the proof is not in a lab report. It is in the way people move here, the way they eat and the pace at which they allow a day to unspool.
A 30-minute charter from San José dropped me onto the hacienda’s private airstrip on a Saturday afternoon. By evening I was outdoors at El Cultivo, the resort’s garden kitchen, sharing a table with an astrologer named Rebecca Gordon and eating vegan food that kept surprising me. Gordon has been running an astrology school in New York for close to two decades and her insistence on making the practice interdisciplinary has landed her keynotes and team-building sessions at Google, Meta and NYU—organizations not exactly known for trusting anything they cannot quantify. That she keeps getting invited back says more than any credential.
My own relationship with astrology has always been secondhand—my mother is a devoted believer and I grew up overhearing enough to be curious without fully committing. Our small group sat under a sky dense with stars as Gordon eased us in gently: before mapping the year ahead in any detail, she had each of us hold a private question in our minds, then threw a set of dice whose numbers, she said, contained the answer. I am not going to share what I asked. But I had just become a first-time homeowner, and the financial currents that come with that were running through everything. I left that table reassured.
Gordon, however, was part of something larger. Hacienda AltaGracia runs a rotating Masters in Residence program at Casa de Agua that brings practitioners to the property for multiday 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 longevity here is not a fixed menu but a living one, and it gives you a reason to come back that has nothing to do with the poolside daybeds—though those are also excellent.
The next morning I gave myself to Casa de Agua and it gave back generously. I chose the Hierbas y Flores, a signature treatment built around freshly picked native herbs and flowers that begins with a deep abdominal massage—organ realignment, energy dispersal, the sort of language that would have lost me a year ago—before working through the full body, stretching tendons and unblocking things I did not realize were blocked. The spa starts with what amounts to its own small pilgrimage: experience showers that shift from tropical rainfall to something percussive, then a clay treatment on heated stone beds surrounding the pool. The one treatment everyone told me not to miss happens outside the spa entirely: the river bath, a two-hour immersion in a private stretch of river involving an aura cleansing, coffee scrub and herbal soak. Torrential rain the night before had other plans. I was more disappointed than I expected, which tells you how quickly this place rewires your expectations.
The consolation was a second session with Gordon. That afternoon she delivered the full year-ahead analysis she had teased at dinner, this time from an outdoor yoga pavilion with the Talamanca range at her back. Her broader read on 2026 was striking: Uranus changing signs for the first time in seven years, bringing what she described as a collective reset in how we think about health, technology and the body. Jupiter moving through Cancer means a year that rewards people who invest in home, family and putting down roots. She moved through each sign with the patience of someone who has been studying these cycles for two decades and genuinely believes the patterns hold. When she arrived at Capricorn—mine, with a Leo rising and Leo moon that visibly delighted her—the forecast narrowed to something so precisely encouraging it felt like a permission slip from the universe: a banner financial year starting in June, a February eclipse that cracks open new income and a seven-year cycle of health reinvention courtesy of that same Uranus transit landing directly in my wellness sector. I wrote every word down like a man taking directions to somewhere he very much intends to go.
Monday belonged to Joomee Song. Song is a celebrity facialist whose method, Kaika—Japanese for “to bloom”—begins not with your skin but with your facial architecture. She felt my jaw and temporalis muscles with her fingertips, diagnostically, without small talk, and within a minute had called out the persistent clenching I do subconsciously. What she explained next made the whole treatment click: chronic jaw tension compresses the muscles around the lymphatic system, the face’s only drainage mechanism. When those muscles lock up, the lymph cannot pump properly, leading to puffiness, sinus congestion and a face that looks heavier than it should. Using targeted Shiatsu pressure and acupressure along the masseter, under the cheekbones and around the orbital muscles, she released years of tension I had no idea I was storing. As the muscles softened, the drainage pathways opened. Within 20 minutes the clenching had resolved, my sinuses had cleared and the face in the mirror appeared genuinely rested—markedly slimmer and depuffed. It lasted for days.
And then there is the food, which ties the whole philosophy together. El Cultivo, the on-property chef’s garden, grows what the kitchen cooks. The executive chefs source from the valley with the devotion of people who believe proximity is a flavor. Grano, the signature restaurant, serves plates that taste like the specific hillside they came from—pickled, fermented, grilled over wood, every dish arriving with a kind of calm authority. Cienfuegos is a weekly dinner where meat is cooked over coconut husk flame while horses perform a rodeo in the adjacent ring, which is a sentence I never expected to write and an evening I would happily live inside again. My grandmother would have understood this kitchen immediately—the same conviction that good food is not a luxury but a form of respect. The proof of this place is in the picadillo as much as it is in any patented technology.
Here is what I will tell you. If you have tried the supplements and the trackers and the protocols and still sense that something essential has been waiting for you to slow down long enough to notice it, go. I flew to a valley in Costa Rica where people live longer than almost anyone on earth, and I let a facialist restore my face and an astrologer illuminate my year, and I ate food that tasted like it had never been anywhere else, and I came home carrying something I did not have when I left. Not a fix. A beginning. The Greeks, it turns out, do not have a monopoly on living well. We just showed up to the table first.