Santa Teresa · Costa Rica · Elopement Curator
Santa Teresa
9.64°N · 85.17°W
Not a photographer for hire, a curator for the whole day: I design it, plan it, book it, style it, photograph it, film it, and hand it back to you. A complete companion to eloping at the surf end of the Nicoya Peninsula.
Santa Teresa is the hardest place in Costa Rica to get to and the one couples come back from most convinced. It is at the bottom of the Nicoya Peninsula, five or six hours from San José with a ferry in the middle, or twenty minutes from a small strip at Cóbano. It faces west, so unlike most of the country's famous locations it gives you the sun going down into the sea. The two things that actually shape a day here are the tide and the road. At high water the beach narrows to almost nothing against the rocks and vegetation, so setup and portraits go at low to mid tide. And in green season the main road and the side accesses rut and flood, which is why September and October are the months I will talk you out of.
Best monthsDec to Mar
The curationEnd to end
Packages from$7,600 USD
Guides on file3
Why an elopement, and why me
The Spiritual Union
An elopement is unlike a wedding. Whereas the wedding is purely focused on aesthetics and performance, elopements are about the spiritual merge: the two of you, a place that means something, and a day built to be lived instead of performed. Done right, it is the most honest set of photographs a couple will ever have. Done by committee, it falls apart in ways you only see later, in the pictures.
Buy a package from a planner
and the day is beautifully arranged, but there is no real “photographer” involved. The pictures come back looking like they were taken on a smartphone. You planned a film and got a receipt.
Bring your own photographer
and you get a good eye with no say in the day. There is a disconnect between what the plan was and what the pictures turn out to be, because the person shooting it did not build it.
Work with me
and you get the best of both worlds. I am a photographer first who plans the entire thing, then brings it home. The person who designs the light is the person standing in it with a camera.
Everyone else plans a day around an activity.
I write a story and play it through one.
It starts with your story, never a location. Before I plan a single thing, I sit with you and listen: how you met, what you are like when no one is watching, the small private details no one else would think to ask for. I write that into a narrative, and then I design the day to play it out. The hike, the boat, the drive up the mountain, that is only the vessel I run your story through, here in Santa Teresa.
This is why the film and the album land the way they do. They are built to carry your story, beat by beat, so that years from now they still move you. Anyone can film two people doing something photogenic in a beautiful place. Turning who you actually are into a film and a set of stills that mean something is the harder thing, and it is the whole of what separates me from everyone else.
What it means to just be present.
Every extra person on an elopement is a seam. A planner to update, a second photographer angling for the same shot, a small crowd of vendors to be aware of. Each one pulls you a little out of the day, and the pictures inherit that split. The reason I hold the whole thing, the plan and the camera, is so that on the day there is no one to manage and no one to perform for.
Present means you are only ever looking at each other. You are not thinking about the schedule, because I am. You forget the camera is there, and that is the exact moment the real frames happen.
01
3 dispatches on fileThe Directory
The Costa Rica groundwork for a Santa Teresa elopement, and the peninsula's own dispatches. Start with the country guide, then write to me about the tide.
02
Four days I photographed on the peninsulaReal Elopements
Four elopements from the Santa Teresa archive: the ceremony that moved a day because the tide and the sunset would not agree, the ferry that was missed, and the October couple who knew exactly what they were buying. Open any card to read the full story.
03
Three tiers · all-inclusive*, priced in USDThe Packages
One person plans, books, styles, photographs, films, and delivers your Santa Teresa elopement. A curated experience rather than photography hours. Three collections, each all-inclusive* of what I run on the ground, and each with its own album. The price is the same anywhere in Costa Rica, so the hardest coast to reach costs the same as the easiest, and the transfers and the four-wheel drive are inside it.
Three ways to elope in Santa Teresa. Each is the whole experience, designed, planned, booked, styled, and shot by one person, and each comes with its own album. The tier sets how many days the trip runs and how much of it becomes a honeymoon. Everything is listed. There is no hourly meter and no add-on column.
Tier I
Essential
$7,600 USD
One day, along the shoreline
The Keepsake Album · 20 pages
- ✓One designed elopement day, start to finish
- ✓Symbolic ceremony, celebrant and styling
- ✓Photography with film, shot by me alone
- ✓Personal flowers, and hair and makeup for one
- ✓Planning, the licensing conversation with Cóbano, and a local fixer
- ✓Transfers on the peninsula, four-wheel drive where the road needs it
- ✓A reserved restaurant wedding dinner for two
Tier II · Recommended
Signature
$9,600 USD
Two days, your choice of adventure
The Signature Album · 20 pages, layflat
Everything in Essential, plus:
- ✓A second day, so the beach and the jungle are not the same morning
- ✓A longer film, cut by hand, with your vows recorded
- ✓Richer florals and ceremony styling
- ✓A 20-page layflat album
Experiences woven in
- ·Your choice of one private charter: a boat off the point, or a helicopter down the coast
- ·A second portrait day on the headlands
- ·Horseback along the sand at the bottom of the tide
Tier III
Honeymoon
$11,900 USD
Three days, from vows to celebration
The Heirloom Album · 30 pages, fine-art
Everything in Signature, plus:
- ✓The elopement and the honeymoon woven into one three-day journey
- ✓Santa Teresa, Mal País and the reserve at the end of the road
- ✓A 30-page fine-art album
Experiences woven in
- ·A private candlelit beach dinner with a musician
- ·Cabo Blanco, the country's oldest protected area, as a guided day
- ·A waterfall morning inland, before the heat
Signature locations in Santa Teresa
The beach at low tide, facing the sunset · The green headlands above Mal País · A jungle road in the morning mist · A private hillside property above the coast · The point, from a boat · Cabo Blanco, at the end of the road
*All-Inclusive covers everything I curate and run: planning, the symbolic ceremony, styling, activities, the dining on your itinerary, permits, local transport, and photography with videography. It does not include airfare or accommodation, which you book yourself. I am glad to recommend where to stay, but for legal reasons I do not book travel or lodging on your behalf.
Start here
Find your elopement archetype first.
Before the date, the tier, or the locations, take two minutes and find the kind of day you are actually after. It is where every day I design begins, and it tells me exactly where to point you in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.
Take the Elopement Compass →04
What you will actually doThe Experiences
This is what you are really paying for. A handful of extraordinary days I design, book, and run for you, each one a chapter of the elopement. Turn the album: the photograph on one page, what it is on the other.
The Experiences
Click arrows to turn pages
The ceremony · low to mid tide
Vows Facing the Sunset
This coast faces west, which is rarer in Costa Rica than people assume and is the single best reason to come to this end of the peninsula. The ceremony goes in the last hour with the sun going down into the water behind you. The constraint is the tide, not the clock: at high water the usable strip of sand can disappear entirely against the rocks and the treeline, so I set the time from a tide table and then check it against the sunset.
Included in every tier
Tap sides · swipe to turn pages
The day itself
How your elopement day goes
Once you have your archetype, here is how the day itself actually goes. Nothing here is your job to arrange. It is already arranged.
The slow morning
No rush, no room full of people. You get ready in your own time while I quietly catch the first frames: the note, the shoes, the light coming up.
We begin the story
We do not work a shot list. We live the day I designed around you, and I document it as it unfolds across Santa Teresa, chasing the light I have already mapped.
The vows
Your words, out loud, with no audience but the place and me. This is the quietest and the most important part of the day, and I shoot it from a distance so it stays yours.
Through the activity
The hike, the boat, the dinner, the drive. This is where the story plays out and the best pictures live, because you are doing something real together, not posing beside it.
The last hour of light
I plan the whole day backward from it. When it arrives we are exactly where we need to be, unhurried, with time to spare.
The record
It comes back not as files but as a finished thing: a curated gallery, and on the Signature, a cinematic film and a printed album. The day, kept.
The full guide · free
The Costa Rica Elopement Guide
Before the peninsula, the bigger picture. I wrote the complete guide to eloping in Costa Rica: two coasts running on opposite calendars, the cloud forest, the volcano country, and this, the surf end of Nicoya. It is the same thinking behind every day I design, in one place.
Read The Costa Rica Elopement Guide →
05
A sample plan, counted backward from your dateThe Timeline
A Santa Teresa elopement is planned against a tide table first and a sunset second, and the road is a real variable for half the year. I handle the licensing conversation, the transfers and the running order. This is how it goes.
The shape of it
Dates and collection, and an honest conversation about the month. December to March is the Pacific dry season and the window I would push you toward. April is transitional and hotter. May to mid-November is green season, with a relative lull in July and August, and September to October is the part I will try to move you off.
The base and the road
I tell you where to stay and why, and you book it. On this peninsula the property's last hundred metres matter more than the property, because in green season a sedan will not make some of them. I book the celebrant, the fixer, the styling and the transfers, with four-wheel drive where the road needs it.
Beach access and licensing
The first fifty metres from the ordinary high tide line is public maritime zone with free passage, and no hotel can make it exclusive. Anything beyond a two-person vow exchange, chairs, an arch, amplified sound, needs a written classification from the Cóbano district licensing office, and commercial licences inside the maritime zone can only go to the registered concessionaire. I get that in writing rather than assume it.
The legal side
No residency requirement and no waiting period. A Costa Rican notary performs the civil marriage with two adult witnesses, which I arrange if you are travelling alone, and it registers with the Registro Civil afterwards. The certificate needs an apostille and a translation before it is used at home. If either of you is divorced or widowed, raise it at the start.
The design
Florals, styling, the charter choice on the upper tiers, the horses if you want them, the table, the film. You see the day written out hour by hour with the rain alternative named.
The tide table
This is the one that sets your ceremony time. At high water this beach narrows to almost nothing, so setup and portraits go at low to mid tide, and I build the evening backwards from where the tide and the sunset actually meet. Some weeks that means moving the date by a day.
You stop deciding
The jungle road at first light, the headland in the afternoon, the sand at the bottom of the tide. I run all of it.
What you keep
Preview photographs within 72 hours, the full hand-edited gallery within four weeks, the film within eight, and the album that comes with your collection.
06
The ones couples ask firstQuestions
The questions I hear most often from couples planning a Santa Teresa elopement, answered plainly. If yours is not here, it will be in my first reply when you reach out.
07
Costa Rica dispatchesFrom the Journal
Longer reads for couples choosing between the two ends of this peninsula and the rest of the country: the complete Costa Rica guide, the Nosara comparison, and why the tide sets the hour here.
Guide
How to Elope in Santa Teresa
A west-facing coast that actually gives you sunset, a beach that disappears at high tide, and a road that decides whether September is possible at all.
14 min read →Guide
The Costa Rica Elopement Guide
The whole country in one place: two coasts on opposite calendars, one national price, and what the notary actually needs from you.
8 min read →
Guide
How to Elope in Nosara
The same peninsula, a few hours north, quieter and greener. Which of the two surf towns you actually want.
13 min read →Tell me about your evening on the peninsula.
Share your date and I will come back within 48 hours with availability, an honest estimate, and the tide, the road, and the headland I would point you toward.
Est. 1999 · Travelling worldwide · Priced in USD
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