After being in San Juan del Sur for a while, it becomes easy to recognize the other foreigners who live here, with their deep tans and locally licensed vehicles, who turn up regularly at local bars for Happy Hour.
The town hosts one of the largest expatriate communities in Nicaragua, many of them retirees, and its popularity is easy to understand. Beautiful beaches, a rock bottom cost of living and friendly local people, along with all the amenities offered by a burgeoning tourism industry, make the place a great alternative to a condo in Florida. That is not to say that San Juan does not present its own issues; blackouts, water shortages, spine rattling roads and access to a much smaller range of goods and services that the average big city dweller is used to expecting.
Some of the immigrants are looking for somewhere more exotic than Fort Lauderdale to retire where their dollars go further, others are travelers who simply fell in love with the place and never moved on. With perseverance, many have been able to create businesses for themselves.
In fact, some of the people who supposedly came here to retire are among the most active, with property holdings, development projects and service businesses. With salable assets at home and pension income, retirees have resources. They are the ones typically seen talking on a cell phone as they walk, with a sheaf of papers under their arm. The younger crowd is divided between the go-getters who have come to make their fortune in real estate speculation and others who spend most of their time surfing and work merely to pay their bar tab.
Then, there are the grey-haired expat men often seen escorting their attractive, twenty-something Nicaraguan girlfriends. They are in a separate category of their own and tend to keep to themselves.
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