The affair that the supermodel and businesswoman Gisele Bündchen has had with Costa Rica for more than a decade turned into a solid crush that led her to declare in the last few hours to Vanity Fair magazine that one of the most intense desires of her life is settle permanently in the country and that their children grow up in the midst of “Pura Vida”. The prestigious publication dedicated the cover of its April issue to Bündchen, in which the top model attended the team from her home in Santa Teresa, Puntarenas, where she has stayed for the last couple of weeks in March. Just in January, she had remained in what for her seems to be, at the same time, a paradise, a “ground wire”.
It may sound cliché, but the anecdotes that he recounted in the extensive interview reveal that, coupled with yoga, jiujitsu, meditation and his leisure time feeling the rays of the sun or the sea breeze, is his amazement at what they offer him the produce of her garden: “The fruits and vegetables harvested from her hillside garden rightfully excite Bündchen. She plans to share her earthy recipes in an upcoming cookbook. ‘My goal is to keep it really simple’, she says. The payoff , much of which spills out onto your countertop, includes ‘little plantains’, ‘skinny plantains’, and square ones, a short fat local plantain; 2 types of kale (mild and crisp); yuca (‘We make yuca chips’); green peppers (‘Last night, we just made these peppers with olive oil and salt’); and pitanga… ‘Have you ever had pitanga?’, says Bündchen as she shows off a cherry-like berry”, Variety reports.
The magazine scored a huge hit by getting an exhaustive look at life from Giselle, 42, divorced from former football star Tom Brady and mother of Benjamin (13) and Viviam (10). And it is that, although it is true dozens of national and international media have reviewed in photographs the top model’s last vacation in Costa Rica -as they did in January and every time she comes to the country- it was Vanity that He opened the doors of his intimacy to him, such as the financial squeeze he experienced during his childhood in the city of Horizontina, in Brazil, in view of his large family.
Or in the accidental way that she was discovered in the middle of her adolescence and that without knowledge of the environment, the English language and latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic, she put it to the test and at 20 she was already bordering on a dangerous line of drugs and excesses that she managed to dominate time, but not before going through where they scare. It is that after the dream wedding with Brady, the birth of her children and the idyllic relationship they had for 13 years; the separation and subsequent divorce were quite surprising. But already then it was more than evident that the turbulent times of the twenty-something Gisele Bündchen had remained in the annals of the past.
The divorce took place in holy peace, with joint custody, zero legal disputes over money and few statements to the press in short and respectful statements. Months later, she declared to El País in Spain, concisely: “It is hard because you imagined that your life was going to be a certain way and you did everything you could. As a child I believed in fairy tales (…)”When you love someone, you do not put them in jail; you set them free”.
A new love around her?
For all reasons, especially her celebrity status, the model’s life is always under public scrutiny and for a few months the rumor has been growing that she and her Jiu-Jitsu instructor, Joaquim Valente, are more than pupil and teacher in view of the fact that only so far this year, he has accompanied her on vacation in Costa Rica. True to her prudent style with which she has managed to evade media scrutiny, Gisele has not said this is my mouth, but she has not hidden either since she has shown herself in public in what appears to be a close relationship that could well be of friends… or not.
For example, the popular American entertainment portal, TMZ, captured the couple a few days ago while they devoured a skewer of meat, playing with the sand and the sea and throwing a frisbee. They have also been photographed riding horses and generally enjoying the warm summer of the Costa Rican Pacific. On January 26th, the American media Page Six published a series of photographs showing the model and the trainer calmly walking on horseback, which had been, until then, the second meeting of the couple that transcends while visiting the country.
Returning to his dream or project of settling in Costa Rica, Bündchen added, always for Variety: “My dream has been to raise my children here. I did not get to be here as much as I would like, but now I bring them more often”. The children have received a mixed education, partially educated at home. The mother is pleased that they grow up in a “village” (Santa Teresa), surrounded by friends and local neighbors.
The depth that Variety’s introspective achieved may well explain why Gisele today values in all its dimensions what she has found in Costa Rica; the legitimate “Pura Vida”, the pleasure for details. In short, letting herself be carried away by nature.
The foregoing is illustrated with one of the many anecdotes that are narrated in the mentioned text: “When she began to suffer panic attacks, when she was in her early 20s, (Bündchen) resorted to yoga, meditation and traveling more frequently to Costa Rica. ‘My natural instinct was: I am not going to be a victim of this. I am not going to sit here and say: Why are you treating me like this? Why are you leaving me standing here naked for like 8 hours without offering me water or any food? Why are they being so mean?”, says Bündchen. “I would sit and ask myself: Am I worth anything?”
In Patricia’s opinion, her twin sister, the inner strength that Gisele was gathering comes from the fact that she had clung to family values and the simplicity of her upbringing. Since she was little, she says, she learned to help with housework like everyone else in the family and because of that, she learned to fend for herself when she had her catwalk debut in Tokyo, at just 14 years old.
At the moment, the top model and businesswoman seems to have found a serene course beginning the fourth decade of her life. For her, to settle in Costa Rica can be a bit complicated, since she is still active in modeling as dictated by the current world trend, which keeps stars of the world catwalks in force, even after 50 years old. But, meanwhile, she and her children spend as much time as they can in these parts where they move at ease, without paparazzi –at least not local–, where they shop in supermarkets and even small stores in the area and they enjoy, as she rightly says, from the first light of dawn, with the beach in the background.
