BLUE ORIGIN

At a retreat on Costa Rica's Papagayo Peninsula, one of the world's longevity hot spots, Maria Yagoda remembers the importance of living well

- Maria Yagoda

An aerial view of Andaz Peninsula Papagayo Resort in Guanacaste Province, on Costa Rica's northwest coast

I WAS FLOATING in the private plunge pool of my villa, embedded in a lush slope of Costa Rican jungle overlooking a bay. The entire scene was animated by butterflies, birdsong, and monkeys rustling in the treetops. Take it all in, I reminded myself, then reflexively grabbed my phone to check the weather app before placing it back on the towel, scolding myself for my lapse in mindfulness. Moments later I did the same thing all over again.

This impulse, I rationalized, came from wanting to know how to best optimize every moment I spent at the serene tropical wonderland of Andaz Peninsula Papagayo Resort, which hosted the first official Blue Zones-sponsored retreat this past summer. It sits a stone's throw from the Nicoya Peninsula, an 80-mile stretch just south of the Nicaraguan border that is home to an unusually high concentration of centenarians, making it one of five geographic "blue zones" identified by the journalist Dan Buettner and a team of researchers as places where an exceptionally large percentage of residents live past the age of a hundred. I suspected that few of them were addicted to their weather apps.