Costa Rica Tourism/National Geographic--Andy Maser, DP

National Geographic Creative Works brought me to Costa Rica to shoot a campaign for the country's tourism board — ten days exploring what pura vida actually means beyond the catchy phrase. I traveled with photographer Rubén Salgado Escudero and National Geographic Explorer Dr. Christine Wilkinson, moving between the Pacific coast, the Caribbean, and the mountains.

The range of what we filmed in those ten days really was special. We spent a day with Bribri women, indigenous guardians of the cacao, following the process from harvesting in the forest through a traditional ceremony that has honored the plant as medicine for generations. We trekked through the Osa Peninsula rainforest with a sea turtle conservation team, went whale watching in the Golfo Dulce, and spent a day on the Aquiares coffee plantation, which has been in the same family since the 1890s (their coffee = incredible).

That kind of access — cultural, ecological, human — is what made this feel like more than a tourism campaign. The hero film and a series of social cuts for Instagram and TikTok have accumulated more than 2.5 million views since release.