I didn't plan to become a cook.
The kitchen found me.
About
I was twenty-four years old, eight months pregnant, sitting at someone else's kitchen table in the Osa Peninsula — and I knew, quietly, that table was about to become mine.
A month later, I had a newborn baby and a kitchen to run. No culinary training. No recipe book.
Just my mother's voice on the phone, a handful of dishes I loved, and an instinct that has never let me down.
That was 2006. I'm still here.
"I cook the way I live — without a fixed recipe. With what the land offers, what the season brings, and whatever comes through me in the moment."
Twenty years of cooking in this corner of Costa Rica — named #4 on the New York Times 52 Places to Visit in 2026. Families, retreat groups, private gatherings, strangers who became friends around a table. A journey of personal transformation that didn’t pull me away from the kitchen — it revealed why I was always there. The food I make is not haute cuisine. It’s something rarer: honest, alive, deeply nourishing.
Alma Tierra Café & Farm
For twenty years, my kitchen has been at Tumbo Resort — a private beachfront estate in Cabo Matapalo where the rainforest meets the Pacific, and where guests consistently called the food the best they'd ever had. That chapter shaped everything I know about cooking for people who truly feel what's on the plate.
Now a new chapter is taking shape. Alma Tierra is the farm-to-table café inside Balsa Nueva Lodge — a small nature lodge on the Osa Peninsula where guests can stay, slow down, and eat food grown steps from the kitchen. A kitchen garden, a greenhouse, an herbal garden coming to life. Cows, goats, chickens, ducks, lambs, pigs, cats. Every meal made from scratch with what the land and the season offer.
Part laboratory, part sanctuary. A place that keeps showing me what it wants to become. The dream is simple: for people to arrive, feel the land, and leave changed by a meal they can't quite explain.
Maga Nómada is rooted here — and available worldwide for retreats, private events, and culinary experiences. I'm also working on my first book: a memoir woven with recipes, tracing the journey from that first kitchen to here.