What Route 27's New Funding Plan Means for Buying in Escazú

Ask a broker why Bello Horizonte homes sell for more per square meter than a comparable house in San Antonio, and you will get an answer about elevation, security, and prestige. That answer is not wrong. It is just incomplete, and the piece it leaves out is currently being negotiated in a government office in San José, with a price tag attached and a timeline that changes what "location" means inside Escazú over the next several years.

The comparison most buyers run when they start looking at Escazú goes something like this: Bello Horizonte commands the highest price per square meter in the canton and has held its value through past downturns, in exchange for a car-dependent lifestyle at higher elevation. San Antonio, the historic core, trades some of that premium for narrow streets you can actually walk, a central church, and small sodas within reach on foot. Trejos Montealegre draws families with paved sidewalks and neighborhood parks. Guachipelín offers gated communities within a manageable commute of Blue Valley School. Each of these is true. None of them accounts for the highway.

The Road That's About to Be Rebuilt, Again

Route 27 has been at or past its design capacity for more than a decade, and everyone who drives it during rush hour or a holiday return already knows this without a report telling them so. What changed this year is that the government finally moved from talking about a fix to funding one.

In April 2026, Minister of Public Works and Transport Efraím Zeledón confirmed that the long-stalled expansion of Route 27 will proceed in two phases instead of one, and that the first phase targets the single most congested stretch of the highway: the segment running from Escazú to Atenas. The full-corridor expansion, from San José all the way to the Pacific port of Caldera, had been estimated at $600 to $700 million. Cutting the scope to the Escazú-Atenas segment brought the first-phase price down to roughly $300 million, according to reporting from the Tico Times.

This is not a minor administrative footnote. The Comptroller General's Office has already identified at least seventeen stretches of Route 27 operating above 70 percent of capacity, the contractual threshold that obliges the state to intervene, and transportation experts have been warning for months that the corridor's growing vehicle fleet, which surpassed 2 million insured vehicles nationally in 2025, is outpacing the road's ability to absorb it.

Construction on this first phase is now targeted to begin in 2027, pending an addendum that must clear the Comptroller's office. Globalvia, which has held the concession since 2013, holds it through 2033, and the current proposal has the company contracting and administering the work rather than financing it.

Why the Funding Method Is the Part Worth Understanding

Here is the detail that changes the calculation for anyone buying in this corridor. In previous negotiations, expanding Route 27 meant extending Globalvia's concession by as much as fifteen years so the company could recoup its investment through tolls, which is exactly the mechanism that has made this highway's toll structure a source of friction for the West Valley since it opened in 2010. The new proposal, reported by AmeliaRueda in June 2026, has the state fund the $300 million directly, specifically to avoid pushing that cost onto daily toll-paying commuters through a longer concession or a steeper fare increase.

That is a meaningfully different incentive structure than the one that has governed this road for sixteen years, and it matters for a simple reason: it decouples the answer to "will this highway get better" from the answer to "will it cost me more to use it." Those two questions have moved together for most of Route 27's history. Right now, they do not.

Worth separating from all of this is the routine annual toll adjustment that already took effect on January 1, 2026, an automatic ten colón increase for light vehicles at the Escazú, San Rafael, Atenas, and Pozón plazas, tied to the exchange rate and U.S. consumer price index. That adjustment happens every year regardless of any expansion news. It is a small, mechanical cost of ownership, and it is worth knowing it is unrelated to the much larger structural project now under negotiation, so buyers do not conflate a routine fee bump with the bigger question of whether the corridor itself gets rebuilt.

What This Means Sector by Sector

Distance from a highway is easy to measure with a map. Exposure to a highway expansion is a different question, and it depends on which sub-neighborhood of Escazú you are weighing.

None of this is a reason to avoid a particular sector. It is a reason to ask a different question than the one most buyers arrive with. The right question is not only "what does this cost per square meter" but "what will living here feel like during a 24-month construction window, and what will it feel like after."

The Window Before the Work Begins

If the addendum clears the Comptroller's office on the timeline the ministry expects, ground could break on this first phase in 2027. That leaves a window, right now, in which a buyer can walk a property in San Rafael or Guachipelín and evaluate it against a known upcoming disruption rather than a hypothetical one. That is a genuinely different position than the one buyers were in a year ago, when the entire project sat in the kind of stalled negotiation that has characterized Route 27 since the original concession was signed.

For a buyer choosing between a Bello Horizonte estate and a San Rafael residence at a similar price point, the honest framing is a tradeoff between insulation now and access later. Bello Horizonte's elevation has always been sold as prestige and privacy. It is also, in this specific context, a buffer against two years of nearby construction. San Rafael's proximity to the interchange has always been sold as convenience. It is also, in this specific context, the location most directly affected by both the disruption and the eventual payoff.

This is also where the value of pairing a purchase with design and renovation guidance becomes practical rather than aspirational. A property near the interchange corridor that needs sound-conscious window upgrades or a reconfigured outdoor living space looks different on a construction timeline than the same renovation on a quieter, higher lot. Knowing which sector you are buying into, and what is scheduled to happen around it, changes what a smart renovation plan looks like before the first hammer swings.

A Few Common Questions

Will my commute get worse before it gets better? Likely yes, for the specific stretch under construction, once work begins. The government's own reporting on this project has been candid that phase one exists precisely because this segment already operates above its contractual congestion threshold, so the starting point is already difficult.

Does this affect Atenas too? Yes. The first phase is defined as the Escazú-to-Atenas segment specifically, meaning the western end of this project runs directly through the other Central Valley market this firm covers closely.

Should I wait until construction is finished to buy near the corridor? That depends on your priorities more than on the market. Prices have not moved in response to this news yet, and a buyer who understands the timeline now has more room to negotiate on renovation scope, financing terms, or timing than one who waits until the project is a visible daily reality.

Escazú is not one market, and it never has been. What changed this year is that the thing separating its sub-neighborhoods is no longer only elevation and history. It is a highway funding decision with a name, a minister, a dollar figure, and a start date. Understanding that timeline before you choose a sector is worth more than another spreadsheet of price-per-square-meter comparisons.

If you are weighing Bello Horizonte against San Rafael, or trying to understand what a property near the Guachipelín interchange will look like to own through a construction cycle, Bryana Conway combines local market knowledge with in-house design and construction oversight, so the conversation about where to buy and the conversation about what to do with the property once you own it happen with the same team, not two separate ones. Let's Connect.