Qualla: San Lucas Island https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:12 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: San Lucas Island https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island San Lucas Island: Introduction https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island/ Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. Named for Luke the Evangelist, San Lucas Island sits in the Gulf of Nicoya about forty minutes by boat from the port city of Puntarenas. At 4.6 square kilometers, it is small enough to walk across in an afternoon -- yet for more than a century, from 1873 to 1991, it contained one of the most feared prisons in Central America. The dictator who founded it abolished the death penalty a year later. The island made the formal penalty unnecessary.

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/d1g8-san-lucas-island-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full San Lucas Island: Before the Prison https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island/ Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before the first cell was built, indigenous groups inhabited San Lucas and the surrounding islands. Archaeologists have identified eight sites on the island, including the remains of apparent houses where stone tools and a metal object were excavated in the late 1970s. The s...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/d1g8-san-lucas-island-before-the-prison.mp3 0:06 2 full San Lucas Island: A Century of Confinement https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island/ Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. Tomas Miguel Guardia Gutierrez, Costa Rica's military dictator, established the prison on San Lucas in 1873. Being sent there was a sentence unto itself: prisoners' lives were short, and torture was not an aberration but a feature. The island's remoteness in the Gulf of Nicoya en...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/d1g8-san-lucas-island-a-century-of-confinement.mp3 0:06 3 full San Lucas Island: From Ruin to Refuge https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island/ Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. After the prison closed in 1991, the facilities sat abandoned. Nature reclaimed what had been cleared -- and it did so with remarkable speed. The island's isolation from mainland predators allowed wildlife populations to recover. Howler monkeys, spiders, snakes, deer, and pheasan...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/d1g8-san-lucas-island-from-ruin-to-refuge.mp3 0:06 4 full San Lucas Island: An Island Among Islands https://qualla.com/san-lucas-island/ Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0. San Lucas joins an unusual fraternity: island prisons turned into heritage sites and tourist destinations. Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, Robben Island in South Africa, the Chateau d'If off Marseille, Devil's Island in French Guiana -- each shares the same geography of isolation ...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/1/g/8/san-lucas-island-wp/d1g8-san-lucas-island-an-island-among-islands.mp3 0:06 5 full