Costa Rica Tops In Sustainable Happiness

Doña Margarita is 81 years old. She makes the best tortillas on Earth.

The people of Costa Rica live the longest, happiest, most ecologically sustainable lives on the planet, according to the Happy Planet Index formulated by a British research group, CNN reports.

The index doesn’t rank the happiest places on Earth, exactly. It combines the self-reported life satisfaction of a nation’s population with its ecological footprint and life expectancy to rate “the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens.”

I’ve been to Costa Rica many times, starting in the early 1990s, when my parents served in the Peace Corps there.  And I’m not surprised it came out on top. (The Dominican Republic came in second, and Latin America scored well, generally.)

(See my Costa Rica photo gallery.)

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