Envision Festival

Envision Festival does not allow its setting to remain in the background. At Rancho La Merced near Uvita, heat, humidity, insects, tropical vegetation and the Pacific coast shape the experience before the first DJ begins. The organisers now make a point of telling visitors that this is not a manicured festival ground with jungle decoration. Rain can turn paths muddy, power and internet can become unpredictable, and camping in the tropics demands more preparation than a weekend on a suburban field. That relationship with nature reaches back to the beginning. Envision started in 2011 with only four or five hundred people near Dominical, created by a group whose backgrounds included event production, permaculture, yoga, sustainable development and alternative community building. The intention was never simply to place electronic music somewhere beautiful. It was to ask what a festival might teach people about how they live once the party is over.

Josh Wendel, Stephen Brooks, Matt Siegel, Justin Brothers, Sarah Wu and other early collaborators brought very different skills into the project. Some understood production and business; others had spent years developing permaculture projects in Costa Rica or exploring transformational gatherings such as Burning Man. Education therefore sat beside celebration from the beginning. Workshops on plants, food systems, relationships, spirituality and environmental practice could occupy the same day as yoga, fire performance and late-night bass music. In 2014, the fourth edition moved into Rancho La Merced near Uvita, a former cattle pasture and wildlife refuge that became Envision’s permanent home. Over subsequent years, tree planting and habitat work gradually changed sections of the property. What once looked far more open now carries a stronger canopy, fruit trees and biological corridors, allowing the festival to point to a physical transformation of its venue rather than treating sustainability only as a message printed on signs.

The musical design has evolved into several distinct ecosystems. Luna is the natural home for world bass and immersive electronic production, associated over the years with artists such as CloZee, Tipper, The Polish Ambassador, Of The Trees and Daily Bread. Lapa functions more like a tropical club, with house and techno running barefoot beneath mist and vegetation. Sol provides the live counterweight through reggae, global fusion and bands such as Groundation, Rising Appalachia, Queen Omega, Xavier Rudd and Dirtwire. El Circo folds acrobatics, fire and performance into the sound programme. That diversity is one reason Envision has avoided relying on obvious EDM headliners. RÜFÜS DU SOL, Shpongle, Beats Antique, Emancipator, Dubfire, Bob Moses and Polo & Pan can all make sense within the same festival because the curatorial link is atmosphere and movement rather than one narrowly defined electronic genre.

For its first nine editions, Envision remained primarily a four-day festival. That changed for the tenth anniversary in 2020, when the organisers expanded it into a seven-day experience. The reasoning was unusually practical: visitors were skipping yoga classes and workshops because too much programming overlapped with music, so three additional days gave people time to explore more deeply. Music remained concentrated toward the later part of the week while earlier days made room for education, excursions and movement. Then the pandemic abruptly stopped the annual rhythm. There were no editions in 2021 or 2022, and Envision did not return until 2023. When it did, the full-week format stayed. Surfing, waterfall trips, beach sunsets, wellness, ceremonies, markets and shared camp life became structural components rather than optional diversions attached to a concert weekend.

Growth created its own problems. The 2024 edition was the twelfth completed Envision and brought pressure on hospitality, water, sanitation and the overall quality of the shared site. Rising industry costs intensified a financial situation the festival later acknowledged openly: Envision had not been profitable for years, and its owners had absorbed substantial losses. The planned 2025 edition was therefore postponed. The pause became an opportunity to redesign systems and relationships rather than continue expanding automatically. When Envision returned from February 23 to March 2, 2026, it deliberately reduced guest capacity to 5,500, two thousand fewer than in 2024. “Back to Our Roots” was more than a nostalgic slogan. The organisers invested in water treatment, sanitation, mapping, public-health systems, local sourcing and stronger relationships with Costa Rican suppliers while openly admitting that previous ambitions had sometimes moved faster than their ability to deliver them well.

The 2026 music still carried the breadth Envision had built over fifteen years: CloZee, Daily Bread, Bob Moses, Polo & Pan, Ivy Lab, MEMBA, Christian Löffler, Emancipator, Damian Lazarus, Chancha Vía Circuito, Mike Love and Dezarie appeared among a much deeper programme of Costa Rican, Latin American and international artists. There is no confirmed 2027 date as of September 2026, although the festival has opened a waitlist and is explicitly discussing how Envision should evolve from 2027 onward. That makes its current position especially revealing. The question is no longer whether a jungle festival in Costa Rica can attract an international audience; it has proved that for more than a decade. The harder question is how large such a gathering should become before scale begins to undermine the values it claims to represent. Rancho La Merced, once cleared cattle land and now increasingly reforested, provides an unusually literal measure of that tension. Envision’s future depends on whether the festival can keep growing ideas without needing to keep growing crowds.