Q COSTA RICA — The Nicoya Peninsula, in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste province, recognized as one of the world’s five official Blue Zones, is currently home to 61 centenarians and could reach 73 by the end of 2026.
Among them is José Flores Flores, born on July 11, 1907, according to the Registro Civil (Costa Rican Civil Registry), whose family is seeking official recognition of him as the oldest man on the planet.
If the certification is successful, Flores would surpass the current male record of 116 years by more than two years.
The oldest living person currently recognized is Ethel Caterham from England, who will turn 117 on August 21. The absolute record is held by Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days old.
Poverty that doesn’t shorten life
Nicoya is the poorest of the five “Blue Zones” in the world, a distinction it shares with Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy), Ikaria (Greece), and Loma Linda (California).
This condition, far from contradicting its longevity, makes it the most perplexing case of the group.
“We were poor, but we always ate well,” a centenarian named Panchito Villegas told El País in the municipality of Nicoya. The phrase sums up the paradox that researchers have been trying to explain for two decades.
Jorge Vindas, founder of the Nicoya Peninsula Blue Zone Association, clarifies the concept of deprivation: these are generations born at the beginning of the 20th century who grew up with physical labor, sufficient basic food, community life, and strong family networks.
“Let’s define poverty,” he proposes, before pointing out that these conditions, combined with a faith-based environment that helped them cope with losses such as the death of their own children, wove a way of life that money cannot guarantee.
José Flores claims that getting up early and eating corn cooked with ash has helped him live so long; several scientists have studied his case.
How Nicoya Entered the Longevity Map
The academic path that led this region to international recognition began in 2005, when demographer Luis Rosero-Bixby, from the Central American Population Center at the University of Costa Rica, presented a paper in France on the low mortality rate of older adults in the country.
Belgian demographer Michel Poulain, one of the creators of the “blue zone” concept, asked him if there were even more exceptional areas within Costa Rican territory.
Rosero confirmed that there were: in the northwest of the country, older adults were dying at rates 20% lower than in the rest of the nation. A study published in the journal Demography in 2008 clarified the magnitude of the phenomenon: the probability of a 60-year-old man reaching 100 in Nicoya was four times higher than for the rest of Costa Ricans, seven times higher than for a Japanese person, and 10 times higher than for an American.
Poulain and journalist Dan Buettner, from National Geographic, conducted expeditions to the peninsula in 2007 and 2008 to rule out the possibility that this was a case of exaggerated age predictions without reliable documentation. They concluded that the estimates were valid and added Nicoya to the official list of Blue Zones.
Corn, Water, and Longer Telomeres
The region’s traditional diet offers some clues. The ancestral consumption of corn—particularly the yellow or “pujagua” variety, with its purple and black hues—is accompanied by a process called nisquesado: cooking the kernels in water with ash from the hearth to remove the husk.
This technique increases the calcium content of the food, a mineral that also appears in high concentrations in the local water and which could be related to the lower incidence of hip fractures in old age. Rosero cautions that these are hypotheses, not conclusions.
What has been confirmed is that people over 60 in the area have longer telomeres than average. These structures, located at the ends of chromosomes, function as indicators of biological aging: the longer they are, the greater the additional life expectancy. “For some reason, in this geographic area, they have longer telomeres, like 10 extra years,” Rosero told El País.
The research also detected a higher percentage of Chorotega indigenous ancestry among the oldest survivors, people who overcame serious illnesses in the first half of the 20th century, before the state expanded basic health services.
The story of Flores and his shadowed areas
Benerando López, a farmer from Sámara who at 99 years old was still growing rice for his family’s consumption, embodies today, at 103, the typical profile of a centenarian from Nicoya: blind, but with a health that surprises those who visit him.
His wife walks barefoot through the plot of land. A few kilometers away, in Obandito de Sardinal, Flores lives in a house made of wood and sheet metal, cared for by his family.
The Flores case is generating both enthusiasm and scientific caution. Spanish researcher José Antonio Rabadán, from the University of Alicante, is working with the family to submit the dossier to the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), a U.S. organization that validates supercentenarians—people over 110 years old—before any potential Guinness World Records recognition.
The dossier includes the birth certificate and a baptismal certificate signed by Bishop Luis Leipod in 1907.
Rosero, however, remains reserved. He points out that there is a gap in the documentation between the registered birth year and 1956, when Flores registered his first child.
“It’s very rare for a man from the coast to have his first child at 50 years old,” the demographer observed. The family explains this gap as years of work in other regions of the country, far from their hometown.
Rosero goes further in his concern: “The problem with promoting Don José’s story is that, if it’s revealed internationally that it’s not true, it casts a shadow on all the serious work we’ve done to document Nicoya’s exceptional longevity.”
An advantage that diminishes with time
Rosero’s most recent research, published in 2023 in Demographic Research, adds a warning that the El País article itself includes: generations born on the peninsula after 1930 do not have the same longevity rates as their predecessors. By 2010, updated analyses indicated that the original Blue Zone had shrunk to approximately a quarter of its initial size.
Changes in lifestyles, accelerated by the region’s economic transformation, explain much of this erosion. Nicoya’s economy now depends on tourism and real estate development, driven by thousands of visitors and foreign residents who arrive, in part, attracted by the very secret that made it famous.
The irony is clear: the search for the lifestyle that made Nicoya long-lived could be one of the factors erasing it.