Costa Rica aims to attract more tourists from Middle East as part of recovery plan: Vice-President

Costa Rica is looking to recover its tourism sector, which was affected by the coronavirus pandemic, through attracting more visitors from the Middle East region, said the country’s Vice President.

Epsy Campbell Barr, who visited the UAE to participate in Expo 2020 Dubai’s Global Goals Week, told the Emirates News Agency (WAM) that her country has already embarked on a recovery plan to attract tourists and bring tourism back up to pre-pandemic levels.

“Last year, we started the recovery of the tourism sector because we feel that we managed the pandemic well. We expect that this year and the next, we can achieve again our goals in terms of visitors to Costa Rica. We invite people from here [the UAE and the region] to visit our country,” she said.

With 6.5 percent of the world’s biodiversity, Costa Rica offers an abundance of nature experiences from rainforests, volcanos, lakes, hot-water rivers and mountains to beautiful coastlines.

Last month, during the visit of President Carlos Alvarado Quesada of Costa Rica to the UAE, Emirates Airline announced initiatives to promote Costa Rica as a tourism destination. This includes offering enhanced air connectivity to the central American country, and the introduction of travel packages.

“We know that the pandemic has a big impact on tourism all over the world, but we deal with that with a lot of proposals to invite people to come to our country,” the Vice President said.

On her participation in the Women’s World Majlis: Gender Equality, the Mother of All Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which took place at the Women’s Pavilion under Expo 2020 Dubai’s Programme for People and Planet, Epsy Campbell Barr said that the most important outcome of her visit was to connect and network with like-minded women of the UAE and the world.

“We put this country [the UAE] as a strategic point to link with Arab countries and reinforce our relationship in all the agendas that we are looking to deal together,” she said.

One of the areas of cooperation is clean energy. With 99 percent of Costa Rican electricity generated by clean energy, the country has a lot of expertise to share with the rest of the world when it comes to decarbonisation, climate change and nature conservation.

“As a country, we are leading all over the world the environment agenda. We have a lot of achievements in terms of conservation. More than 25 percent of our territory is in different forms of conservation. We want to share our experience with other countries,” she said.

“Small countries and big countries could work together to learn from each other. We have a lot of knowledge about [decarbonisation] and we can achieve the international goals of climate change if we see a specific experience like my country has,” she added.

WAM/Lina ibrahim/Amjad Saleh