Neither of them came here with a plan.

Jackie came down for a season on a coffee farm and never booked the flight home. She’d trained as a massage therapist before she came and kept at it here, and if you ask around Dominical, people will tell you about her hands before they tell you anything else.

Nate came for the surf. Working construction sites and restaurant kitchens before that, catching waves whenever he could get them, and then one trip down here turned into seven years without him even realizing it.

They were friends a long time before they were anything else. Then Nate fell off a roof in 2023, broke his back, and ended up on Jackie’s massage table. Somewhere in that hour everything rearranged itself.

The land came from an old Tico man who’d held this riverfront most of his life. He adored Jackie — partly her Spanish, which is good enough that he never had to slow down for her, and partly because she’d turn up with coffee and empanadas and stay to talk. He could have sold to anybody. He sold to her.

Then Jackie’s mother passed away. What her mother left her is what built this — every bit of it went into this land. Jackie built River Soul for her. She found the crew, hired them, and ran the whole site herself, every plan and every problem, all of it in Spanish. Her dad, Steve, was in the States through most of it, on the phone at odd hours. Steve builds, paints, and can generally do whatever the job turns out to need, and he’ll walk you through it while he does. Between the two of them, across two countries, the casitas went up.

Nate became a part of it all in the middle of that. Bare ground, rebar, Jackie on the phone. Not much to look at yet. But he could see it, and he’s been here since.

This year they got married. In January, their daughter Skylar arrives.

What they’ve got here isn’t a resort and they aren’t going to pretend otherwise. No front desk, no buffet, nobody in a uniform. What there is: the river twenty steps from your door, howler monkeys at first light, macaws crossing the tree line while your coffee goes cold, and a quiet that shows up at the end of a day you spent doing very little (or too much).

That’s the part they’ve never been able to put on a website. People come for a week, and somewhere around day three you can watch it land — that life is allowed to feel like this.

Pura Vida isn’t a slogan down here. It’s a description of what’s happening.

Come as you are. The river does the rest.