There is no one, single way to do the permitting process, and there is no single entry point. How you do permitting will depend a lot on who you hire and how much you’re willing to spend. Many of the procedures can be carried out in parallel, either legally or extra-legally. Permitting any sizable construction project, however, is not a do-it-yourself experience, and for the most part you’ll start out by hiring the professionals you will need for the process. After drawing up your construction plans, you’ll be doing permitting in an attempt to please basically four government entities. The Colegio Federado de Ingenieros y Arquitectos (CFIA) will want to know that your construction plans include all the basic elements that construction plans should. They will also want to know that for the project, you have hired professionals registered with the CFIA. The Secretaria Técnica Nacional Ambiental (SETENA) needs to be satisfied that your construction project will not significantly damage the environment or the local community. If you’re doing a development of a high-enough density, the Instituto Nacional de Vivienda y Urbanismo (INVU) has a whole list of different permits and go-aheads you’ll have to get from different government agencies before it will give your project the green light. And finally, the local municipality where you are building will want you to present the CFIA, SETENA, and INVU approvals (plus perhaps a few others) before it will grant you your construction permits. An important point is that each municipality requires different documents for the granting of the final construction permits. But even if the municipality grants you a construction permit without one of the permits you need from some branch of the central government bureaucracy – say, the environmental certification – you still need that permit. This redundancy of authority is one of the curiosities (some would say absurdities) of the Costa Rican system: Just because a builder has construction permits from a municipality does not mean the construction is legal. The other permits for the construction must be obtained regardless of what the municipality says or you could be shut down at any moment by a central government regulator. Keep this in mind if you’re tempted to bribe a municipal official to get your permits. That ill-gotten permit won’t do you much good if the central government decides to bring down the hammer. At the same time, however, the bitter irony (as long-time developers in Costa Rica will tell you) is that there are so many regulations and restrictions administered independently of one another by so many different branches of the Costa Rican bureaucracy that sometimes you don’t fully comply with the law even when you want to. Do your best. A final important principle to keep in mind as you approach the permitting process is that land in Costa Rica is under the Napoleonic legal regime, not the common law regime found in the United States and Canada. In practice, that means that while you technically own the land, you don’t own any natural resource on top of it or below it. Trees, mineral deposits, well water, rivers, lakes, springs, wildlife, and all the rest are property of the State. The principle to follow, therefore, is that if you are going to remove, use, or modify any of these things on “your” property, there is probably a permit or concession you will have get from somewhere.