The Costanera — Nicaragua’s new Pacific Coastal Highway — is the single most ambitious road infrastructure project the country has undertaken in the last hundred years. When fully complete, it will run *357 kilometres* along the entire Pacific coast, from the border with Costa Rica in the south at El Naranjo, all the way to Potosí in the north on the Gulf of Fonseca.

The project is being built in three phases. Phase one — 119 kilometres connecting El Naranjo to Masachapa — this is being completed at present.  The first 30 kilometres, from the Costa Rican border crossing to Playa El Remanso near San Juan del Sur, were inaugurated in November 2025. Construction crews have been pushing north and as of mid-2026, this first phase is nearing completion.
The numbers alone tell part of the story: 22 bridges, 257 drainage structures, built to international quality standards, financed in part by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE). But numbers do not capture what it actually feels like to drive along it.
The new road is smooth, wide, well-drained, and — perhaps most surprisingly — **scenic in a way that the old route never was**. The highway hugs the coastline far more closely than the old tracks. You catch glimpses of the Pacific between stretches of dry forest. You cross new bridges over river mouths where fishing boats sit at low tide. You pass through small coastal communities — Playa El Coco, Escameca, Hermosa, La Flor — that have existed for generations but most travellers never saw them, because the journey to reach them simply wasn’t worth it.
That calculation has changed entirely. What was a grinding 3-hour drive from Managua to Popoyo is now approximately 40% faster. The trip between Popoyo and Playa Maderas near San Juan del Sur, which used to take at least an hour and a half on unpaved roads, has become a smooth, direct connection.
The Costanera means that **the Pacific coast of Nicaragua is now accessible to any traveller**, in any ordinary vehicle, in any season. It means a family flying into Managua can be on a beautiful, uncrowded Pacific beach in under two hours. It means a couple booked at Mukul, Morgan’s Rock or Rancho Santana arrive relaxed rather than rattled. It means a surf traveller can hop between Popoyo and San Juan del Sur in a morning rather than losing half a day on bad roads.
ORO Travel has been operating in Nicaragua since 1995. We have driven every road in this country in every condition. We know which beach requires a local guide and which one you can find with a simple map. We know which lodge just opened and which one has been quietly excellent for a decade.
The Costanera changes what we can offer — and we are already building new itineraries around it.
If you are a travel professional thinking about Nicaragua’s Pacific coast as a product, now is the right moment. The road is there. The lodges are there. The beaches are extraordinary and genuinely uncrowded. And the team on the ground that has had intimate knowledge of this coastline for thirty years is here, ready to help you build something memorable.