The Wave of Women’s Only Retreats

Women are increasingly choosing to travel, retreat, and invest in themselves in the company of other women, and the experiences they are creating together are extraordinary. In open-air shalas where the jungle breathes around them. Around fire circles at dusk, at long tables sharing meals grown from the earth beneath their feet, and in circles of women who arrived as strangers and leave as something closer to kin.

Women’s only retreats in Costa Rica are rising as part of a deepening global movement, one rooted in the recognition that women heal, grow, and thrive in particular ways when held in the company of other women. At Mandala Ojochal retreat center in Costa Rica, we are witnessing this firsthand. Our 2026 and 2027 calendars reflect a surge in women’s groups and women-led retreat facilitators choosing this corner of the jungle to do their most meaningful work.

A Movement With Numbers Behind It

The global wellness retreat market is growing at over 10% annually and is projected to reach nearly $400 billion by 2030. Women are driving that growth and account for roughly 78% of the wellness tourism market, a share projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.3% through 2034. With over 1.1 billion women experiencing menopause by 2025, a new wave of retreats designed specifically around women’s health and life transitions is emerging to meet a need that has long gone unaddressed.

Women are choosing retreat experiences as an affirmation of their worth, their time, their need for depth, and their desire to be in genuine community with other women.

The Ancient Practice of Women Gathering

Long before the wellness industry existed, women gathered. The loom was never just a tool, it was a place of story, strategy, and song. In textile traditions across every continent, women came together to create with their hands moving in rhythm and their voices filling the space between the threads. What was woven was always more than cloth, it was community. A memory, and the invisible fabric holding everything together.

Modern women’s only retreats in Costa Rica and around the world are a continuation of this practice. The shala has replaced the loom room and the cacao ceremony has joined the campfire, but the impulse is unchanged: to make something together, to be witnessed, and to remember what we are capable of when we are not doing it alone.

The Rise of Sisterhood and the Healing of Sister Wounds

Women’s retreats are containers for something rarer than we might admit: the experience of being fully witnessed, celebrated, and supported by other women. Of having your gifts named, resting in the resonance that happens when a group of women orient toward the same intention together.

The cultural shift underway is conscious and deliberate. Women are choosing to lift each other up, to build genuine community, to celebrate rather than compete. Sister wounds, the quiet injuries of comparison, withholding, and isolation, are real, and the medicine that heals them is more sisterhood, more shared intention, more spaces where women can show up fully and be met fully. Women’s retreats are providing exactly that.

Celebrating Women’s Thresholds

There are passages every woman moves through that our culture has largely failed to honor. Perimenopause and menopause arrive in the middle of a woman’s most productive years, carrying profound physical, emotional, and spiritual change that deserves ceremony rather than silence. Motherhood transforms a woman at the level of her cells. The woman stepping into visibility in her business, her leadership, or her creative life is crossing a threshold equally worthy of acknowledgment and celebration.

Women’s only retreats hold space for all of it. At Mandala Ojochal we are seeing this expressed in beautiful and specific ways. Perimenopause-themed retreats that weave botanical workshops, educational sessions, and open empathic sharing circles together into a container of genuine support. Over-50s travel retreats where women explore local markets, food and wine tastings, and the cultural richness of the Southern Zone alongside women who understand where they are in life.

These retreats do not just acknowledge women’s thresholds. They celebrate them, normalize them, and return women to themselves more whole than when they arrived.

The Healing That Happens in Women-Only Space

For many women, healing happens most fully in the presence of other women, a safety that lives in the body as much as the mind. Nervous systems settle and voices that have learned to be careful can finally speak freely.

Women healers and practitioners bring a particular transmission to their work. Those who have moved through the same thresholds, who carry the same cellular knowing, hold a quality of space that is felt before it is understood. Somatic therapists, breathwork facilitators, yoga teachers, ceremonialists, bodyworkers, and coaches working within women-only containers create conditions for healing that are simply not available everywhere.

Women are choosing retreat experiences as an affirmation — of their worth, their time, their need for depth, and their desire to be in genuine community with other women

What Women’s Retreats Look Like in Practice

The range of women’s only retreat experiences is as wide and varied as the women who create and attend them. At Mandala Ojochal, we have had the privilege of hosting some extraordinary expressions of what women’s retreats can be, and the creativity and intentionality of the facilitators we work with continues to inspire us.

We are seeing:

• Play themed retreats where women hula hoop in the shalas, take silk classes on the beach, learn to dance, and gather in the kitchen to cook nourishing meals together, reclaiming joy and lightness as serious medicine.
• Surf and yoga retreats bring women into the Pacific for surf lessons woven together with breathwork and movement practice.
• Yoga and bodywork retreats combine massage, fascia release, anatomy workshops, and experiential training for deep somatic healing.
• Textile and art retreats see women sewing, creating, learning, and displaying their finished work, the ancient act of making by hand alive in a modern jungle setting.
• Artistry and performance retreats bring together actors, dancers, and performers for specialized educational programs that blur the line between training and transformation.
• Nutrition and healing retreats draw on Ayurvedic philosophy, yoga, nutritional detox, and cooking classes as a unified path to restoration.
• Fitness retreats designed for female athletes combine personal training, yoga, massage, and adventure tours in an environment that honors the power and specificity of the female body.

Whatever the modality, the throughline is the same: intentional space, held by women, for women.

Women’s Only Retreats in Costa Rica

Costa Rica has long been a destination that makes transformation feel possible. The density of life and the way the jungle presses in with its aliveness asks every visitor to slow down, look around, and let something in. The Southern Zone, where Mandala Ojochal sits, amplifies this quality — quieter and wilder than the more traveled parts of the country, and more genuinely itself.

For women traveling alone, a women’s only retreat in Costa Rica offers something especially valuable. Flights are direct from most major North American cities, ground transportation can be arranged seamlessly from San José or Quepos, and the retreat container handles every logistical detail so that she can simply arrive and open. Marino Ballena National Park and its whale-tail sandbar sit minutes from the property. Waterfalls, jungle trails, and the Pacific are woven into the landscape.

For a woman who has never traveled internationally alone, a women’s only retreat in Costa Rica is one of the most supported and expansive ways to begin. For the woman who has traveled everywhere, the Southern Zone offers something genuinely new.

“Pure magic! The property is hugged by the lush jungle yet it breathes with intentional design and thoughtful flow. The multiple shalas are gorgeous, open air with a steady breeze. I stayed in a bungalow which was so clean, cozy and private- the perfect haven for reflection between workshops and activities during my recent women’s retreat in Ojochal. This is by far the most beautiful and supportive retreat center in Uvita area, highly recommend!“

~Marina, Women’s Retreat Guest

The Invitation

Women are gathering. They are healing, creating, surfing, dancing, weaving, cooking, moving, sharing, and building communities rooted in truth and shared intention. The wave of women’s only retreats in Costa Rica and around the world is building, and Mandala Ojochal is honored to be part of it.

If you are a women’s retreat facilitator looking for a venue that meets the depth and specificity of your work, we would love to hear from you. If you are a woman looking for your first retreat or your next one, this is your invitation.