How they met
Andrea and Juan are both from San José, Costa Rica, and met during their university years through a shared group of friends who studied abroad together for a semester. They came back from that exchange already a couple, and the relationship has carried that easy momentum ever since. When they started planning the wedding, they wanted to give their families something that felt like a small, intentional trip, somewhere close enough to feel familiar but different enough to slow everyone down. Antigua, with its colonial weight and the slowness of its cobblestone streets, was the obvious answer.
The day
The wedding day moved at the rhythm of a destination wedding done right. Andrea got ready in the morning with Beauty Station handling hair and makeup in a quiet hotel suite, while Juan and his groomsmen got dressed across the city. By midafternoon, the families and the small group of guests they had brought from Costa Rica started filling the cobblestone streets around the Capuchinas Ruins, all of them dressed up but visibly relaxed.
The ceremony was held inside the open-air courtyard of the Capuchinas, the kind of space where vows do not need amplification. Carmen Reyes built a flow that protected the intimacy of the moment, with seating tight to the altar and a short, unhurried program. After the ceremony, guests moved to a side cloister for an extended cocktail hour, and the reception went deep into the night with long toasts in Spanish, dancing, and the particular noise that only Costa Rican wedding parties seem to make.
At the venue
Capuchinas was built for moments like this. The stone walls and the open sky inside the cloisters give the ceremony a frame that feels almost theatrical, but the scale of the venue keeps everything personal. We worked with the natural light through the late afternoon, then leaned into candlelight for the reception, when the volcanic backdrop of Antigua disappeared into night.
Photographer's note
Andrea and Juan brought their entire world to Antigua for one weekend, and the photographs hold that sense of a family transplanting itself for a few days. There is nothing better to document than that.
