Moving to San Juan del Sur: the practical bits

The hard part of moving here is not the visa or the beach. It is that a normal week involves several errands that were one click at home, and one of them is a two-hour drive away.

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Delivery from C$184 in town and C$276 to the outer beaches. Every fee is agreed before we set off.

Someone carrying paper bags of groceries out of a local shop

The recurring household stuff

  • Drinking water arrives in refillable bottles on a deposit-and-exchange basis. This becomes a standing weekly thing very quickly.
  • Cooking gas is a canister you exchange, not a utility. Keeping a spare is what everyone learns to do after the first time.
  • The weekly shop is the real time sink, particularly the heavy end of it — water, cleaning supplies, pet food, anything sold in a sack.
  • Most of this can be a repeating order. Send the list once, edit what changed each week.

Why everything big comes from Managua

  • Furniture, appliances, building materials, most electronics and anything you ordered online arrive in Managua, not here.
  • That is a two-and-a-half-hour drive each way, so a "quick trip to collect it" is a whole day gone.
  • Blink runs scheduled pickups from Managua — packages, furniture, fridges, washing machines, cargo — with proof of collection and delivery.
  • It is quoted as its own job rather than folded into a delivery fee, because it is a different piece of work and pretending otherwise would just mean a surprise at the end.

The things that catch new arrivals out

  • Addresses are landmark-based, not numbered. Learning to describe your house by what it is near is a genuine skill here.
  • Cash matters more than cards, and small notes matter more than large ones.
  • The wet season changes which roads are sensible, which affects deliveries out to the beaches more than anything in town.
  • Almost every business runs on WhatsApp. Saving the numbers you use is the closest thing to installing apps.

Tell us what you need

Message us in English or Spanish. We answer by hand, so you get a real person and a real price rather than an automated reply.

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