SAN LUCAS ISLAND, COSTA RICA — "If you don't have anything to do," says the graffiti scratched into the cellblock wall, "don't come here to do it."
That would have been excellent advice from 1883 to 1989, when this penitentiary on San Lucas Island was synonymous with cruelty and isolation. Inmates labored in the tropical sun, breaking rocks and harvesting salt from the sea, dragging their leg irons and dreaming of escape.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, October 22, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 39 words Type of Material: Correction
Costa Rica: A caption with a photograph accompanying an article in Sunday's Travel section on San Lucas Island, Costa Rica, identified the beach as on San Lucas. The beach pictured is Santa Teresa beach, on the nearby Nicoya Peninsula.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, October 26, 2008 Home Edition Travel Part L Page 3 Features Desk 1 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Costa Rica prison: A caption with a photograph in last week's section on San Lucas Island, Costa Rica ("Escape to a Tropical Alcatraz"), identified the beach as San Lucas. The beach pictured is Santa Teresa beach, on the nearby Nicoya Peninsula.
I've wanted to come here for years. I'm always on the lookout for out-of-the-way wonders in a country I know pretty well, from living here and writing about it. Beyond that, there's something about a former prison that draws me like an inmate to the exercise yard.
I visit the cells and imagine how I'd hold up, or I scan the layout, hatching an escape plan. And escape from an island prison is all the more evocative. Judging by the popularity of Alcatraz and other former prisons, others share my fascination too.
San Lucas is one of the newest such attractions. A 2001 decree declared the island a wildlife refuge and historical monument, saving it from becoming a mega-resort. That was great news for the old prison, the island's eight pre-Columbian archaeological sites and its inhabitants of monkeys, armadillos and parrots.
Visiting the island
From the time of the prison's closure to the island's opening as a national park in December, it was almost as hard to get onto San Lucas as it once was to get off.
Just before the official opening, however, I disembarked at the barnacle-encrusted dock where for a century, inmates arrived to do time at Costa Rica's version of Alcatraz. We'd hired a lancha (a small boat) in Puntarenas, a city on Costa Rica's Pacific coast. It's a 20-minute jaunt across the water to Isla San Lucas.
Two park officials, my local pal Josue and I were the only souls on the island. The only living souls, that is. The place is rife with ghosts.
They're in the bat-infested prison church, the upstairs offices where you walk the beams or risk falling through the rotting floorboards, the old dining hall invaded by strangler fig trees and, most of all, in the dank and dilapidated cells. You can feel the weight of the former inmates' waiting, their caniando -- doing time.
The "ghosts" left graphic messages on the walls. Soccer players make winning goals, knives drip blood and a jaguar stalks toward a cell's one tiny window. A grinning cat declares, "Sonria al canaso" (Smile while you do your time). Crosses abound, as do sad-faced Jesuses and beatific Virgins, one with her robe flaring out like a river delta.
