Explore the first two years of the process that built the Caminos de Osa tourism destination in southern Costa Rica. Discover lessons learned, challenges, and triumphs along the way.
Read our summary report: Tapa dulce, Leadership, and Trails: Reflections on Caminos de Osa.

About Caminos de Liderazgo

With the goals of developing leadership skills, and creating a tourism offering based in the vibrant culture of the region, the Caminos de Liderazgo program began on May 13, 2014.  Participants came together for the first time at Tiskita Jungle Lodge in Punta Banco, Costa Rica.  During this first meeting, participants shared their vision for their businesses and participated in activities focused on leadership, tourism, sustainability, and culture.

The Caminos de Liderazgo program is a collaboration between local leaders and entrepreneurs, the CRUSA Foundation, INOGO, SINAC, and RBA with the support of businesses such as Nature Air, Travel Excellence and Horizontes.  The program will work with about 30 regional leaders to achieve increased prosperity for the inhabitants, their local cultures, and biodiversity of the region,

The core objectives of Caminos de Liderazgo are to promote the development of an interconnected supply chain of local service and product providers, and to promote sustainable economic development with an increase in job offerings related to cultural tourism and nature tourism. Caminos de Liderazgo will also work to build a strong network of entrepreneurs in the region, who will be able to support one another as they work to improve the quality of life of people in the region.  A critical component of this program is access to various markets, which will be facilitated by the collaboration with national tour operators.

Caminos de Liderazgo was developed in response to direct requests from entrepreneurs in the region, as well as the results of INOGO’s Phase 1 diagnostic analyses and CRUSA’s evaluation efforts.  Initially INOGO set out to develop a Leadership Program, which had significant programmatic overlap with CRUSA’s Caminos de Osa project. In order to avoid duplicating efforts and to achieve the greatest impact possible, the decision was made to merge these two programs creating “Caminos de Liderazgo.”