Insider's Limon

The 2010 AUDIO guide to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica

Frank Leon

Puerto Viejo

Frank Leon is the youngest son of one of Puerto Viejo's most enduring merchant families - from the Chinese lineage that surfaces so often in so many unexpected places around the Caribbean. His grandfather, who came to the country with little but what he carried, and later his father Manuel, set-up shops and farms in the early 1950's when there were few customers with any currency that could be banked, but with entrepreneurial skill and persistence brought goods and services, and some of the first electric lights to the village via the unheard of wonders of a fuel generator.  The groceries-to-tin-roofs market they established, El Chino, on the old waterfront, still stands and operates little changed from it's original "frontier" design, but the family's diverse business interests have grown, along with the town...in every direction!

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