Long before the Europeans arrived, the Costa Rican isthmus was a cultural frontier. Across its territory ran the invisible line separating the Mesoamerican world from the Intermediate Area of South American influence, and that condition of a bridge marked its peoples for millennia. In the northwest, on the plains of Guanacaste and the Nicoya Peninsula, cultures of Mesoamerican stock related to the Chorotegas flourished: maize farmers, remarkable potters and traders who by around AD 800 dominated Greater Nicoya. In the rest of the country, peoples of Chibcha language and culture prevailed —Huetares, Bribris, Cabécares, Brunkas or Borucas, Malekus, Térrabas— more closely tied to the south of the continent.
The Huetares, split into an eastern kingdom in the Guarco Valley and a western one under the chief Garabito, controlled much of the Central Valley; the Bribris and Cabécares lived in the mountains of Talamanca, organized into matrilineal clans guided by spiritual leaders —the awá or sukias—; and in the South Pacific, the ancestors of the Brunkas left behind the country's most enigmatic archaeological legacy. It is estimated that when the Spanish arrived some four hundred thousand Indigenous people lived in the territory, a small and scattered population compared with the great kingdoms of Mexico or Peru.
These societies left an extraordinary heritage. On the slopes of Turrialba they raised the great ceremonial center of Guayabo, settled from around 1000 BC and at its height by about AD 800, with cobbled causeways, mounds, bridges and aqueducts that still work; it came to hold some ten thousand inhabitants before being abandoned around 1400, a century before the conquest, for reasons still unknown. In the southern Pacific they carved the famous stone spheres of the Diquís, perfectly rounded granite balls made by the culture of the same name, whose purpose is still debated and which Unesco declared a World Heritage Site in 2014. That Indigenous inheritance lives on today in the country's Indigenous territories, above all among the Bribris and Cabécares of Talamanca.
Christopher Columbus touched the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica on September 25, 1502, during his fourth and last voyage, anchoring off Uvita Island, near present-day Limón. He was struck by the gold ornaments the Indigenous people wore: from that impression would come, in time, the name 'Costa Rica'. But the promised wealth proved an illusion. The conquest was slow, bloody and difficult; only in 1561 did Juan de Cavallón begin the effective occupation of the interior, and in 1563 Juan Vázquez de Coronado —remembered as 'the peaceful conqueror' for his relatively moderate dealings with the chiefs— founded Cartago in the fertile Guarco Valley, the first capital and the only truly lasting Spanish settlement. Coronado would die in 1565, in the wreck of the San Josepe.
With no great deposits of precious metals and no large Indigenous population to subject to the encomienda, Costa Rica became the southernmost and poorest province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, into which it was incorporated from the mid-16th century. There were none of the great estates or the landowning aristocracy of other colonies here: what prevailed was a society of farmers working their own land, so short of hands that, according to tradition, even the governors themselves had to take up the plow. By around 1800 the province had barely some fifty thousand inhabitants.
That egalitarian poverty left a deep mark on the national imagination. Costa Ricans trace back to that austere, horizontal colony the origin of their industrious, sober and scarcely hierarchical character, and of a relative social equality that, centuries later, would make building their democracy easier. Cartago, the colonial capital for more than two and a half centuries, was also the country's spiritual heart: there, according to legend, arose the devotion to the Virgin of Los Ángeles, the 'Negrita', found in 1635 and today the national patron saint.
Costa Rica became independent from Spain on September 15, 1821, along with the rest of Central America, but the news took almost a month to reach the remote province: there was no war of independence here and no battles, only a peaceful transition learned of by letter. On October 29, 1821, the town council of Cartago signed the Act of Independence. At once, however, an intense debate opened over the future: conservative Cartago and Heredia leaned toward joining Agustín de Iturbide's Mexican Empire, while the more liberal San José and Alajuela argued for outright independence or for union in a Central American federation.
The dispute erupted in the brief War of Ochomogo, in April 1823, in which the forces of San José prevailed over those of Cartago. As a result, the capital moved definitively to San José. Once the short-lived Mexican empire dissolved, Costa Rica joined the Federal Republic of Central America, whose constitution was decreed in 1824. That same year, on July 25, 1824, the Partido de Nicoya —the origin of today's Guanacaste— voted in an open town council to annex itself to Costa Rica rather than to Nicaragua, adding a vast territory to the country.
The first republican decades were ones of institutional organization. The key figure was Braulio Carrillo, head of state in 1835-1842, remembered as 'the architect of the Costa Rican state': he put the administration in order, issued codes of law, moved the branches of government to San José and laid the foundations of a modern state. After the fall of the Central American Federation, Costa Rica proclaimed itself a fully sovereign Republic in 1848, under the presidency of José María Castro Madriz, who also adopted the flag and coat of arms that, with variations, survive to this day.
No other plant weighed as heavily on the making of Costa Rica as the coffee bush. Introduced at the start of the 19th century, coffee found ideal conditions in the volcanic soils and temperate climate of the Central Valley, and very soon became the engine of the economy. The first recorded export dates from 1820, bound for Panama; in the 1830s it was already being shipped to Chile, from where it was re-exported to London, and in the 1840s direct trade with Europe —above all with England— took hold, driven by merchants such as the Briton William Le Lacheur.
The impact was enormous. Between 1850 and 1890 the 'golden bean' came to account for close to 90% of the country's exports and was practically its only product sold abroad. Coffee created a class of large growers and mill owners —the so-called 'coffee aristocracy'— that concentrated wealth and political power, but it also sustained thousands of peasant families in the Central Valley who farmed their own plots and improved their standard of living. Innovations such as wet processing, adopted in the 1830s, raised the quality and the reputation of Costa Rican coffee.
Coffee earnings financed the modernization of the country: roads, schools, the capital's street lighting and trams and, as the ultimate symbol of the refinement that elite longed for, the National Theater of San José, inaugurated in 1897 and modeled on the great European theaters. Coffee tied Costa Rica's fate to international markets, shaped its geography —the country was settled along the advancing coffee frontier— and largely funded the building of the 19th-century state.
In the mid-19th century the young republic lived its founding epic. The American adventurer William Walker, at the head of an army of filibusters, had seized Nicaragua in 1855 and intended to dominate all of Central America and restore slavery. President Juan Rafael Mora Porras grasped the threat and called the people to arms: so began the National Campaign of 1856-1857, considered the episode that truly drove the building of the nation-state and of Costa Rican identity.
The Costa Rican army entered Nicaragua and fought its two most famous battles. On March 20, 1856, it defeated the filibusters at the Battle of Santa Rosa, in Guanacaste, in barely fourteen minutes. Shortly afterward, on April 11, 1856, came the Second Battle of Rivas: to drive out the filibusters entrenched in the Guerra inn, the young drummer boy from Alajuela Juan Santamaría —nicknamed 'el Erizo'— offered to set the building on fire with a torch and died in the feat, becoming the country's greatest national hero. The war also left a cruel aftermath: a cholera epidemic that took thousands of lives at home.
The conflict ended with Walker's surrender on May 1, 1857. The victory sealed the sense of nationhood, exalted popular heroes above the elites and was engraved in collective memory. Today Juan Santamaría is honored with a museum and a monument in Alajuela, with the name of the country's main international airport and with a public holiday, April 11, on which Costa Rica commemorates that defense of its sovereignty.
By the last third of the 19th century, exporting coffee through the remote, mountainous Caribbean had become a national obsession. In 1871 work began on the Atlantic Railway, a titanic undertaking of some 160 kilometers through the jungle that cost a fortune and thousands of lives. After the first contractors failed, the project fell into the hands of the young American businessman Minor Cooper Keith, who consolidated the country's foreign debt in exchange for enormous concessions: more than 400,000 hectares of land and the right to operate the railway for 99 years. The line was completed in 1890.
To lay the tracks in a setting of endless rain, yellow fever and malaria, Keith brought in labor from various origins. The first Afro-Antillean contingents reached the port of Limón from Jamaica in December 1872, aboard the schooner Lizzie; their presence, together with that of Chinese and Italian workers, transformed the Costa Rican Caribbean forever and gave rise to the region's vibrant Afro-Caribbean culture, with its creole English, its calypso music and its coconut cooking.
Along the tracks, Keith planted bananas, first as cheap food for the laborers and later as a business of his own. Out of those plantations came, in 1899, the United Fruit Company, a banana giant that for decades shaped the economy, the society and even the politics of the Caribbean slope and the South Pacific. The 'banana enclave' brought jobs and foreign currency, but also dependency, labor conflicts —such as the great banana strike of 1934, led by Carlos Luis Fallas— and a long argument about national sovereignty in the face of foreign companies' power.
The 20th century consolidated in Costa Rica a democratic, reformist tradition rare in the region. In the 1940s the government of Dr. Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia pushed through, in an unusual alliance with the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, an advanced package of reforms: the Social Guarantees written into the Constitution, the Labor Code and the creation of social security through the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, in 1941, as well as the University of Costa Rica. But political tensions kept growing.
Everything blew up with the elections of February 1948. The opposition proclaimed Otilio Ulate the winner over Calderón; Congress, controlled by the governing side, annulled the vote alleging fraud, and the country plunged into a 44-day civil war, between March and April 1948, the bloodiest episode in its history, with some two thousand dead. Out of it came the victory of José Figueres Ferrer, 'don Pepe', a landowner who led the National Liberation Army and then a Founding Junta of the Second Republic.
That Junta's decisions set the country's course. Figueres kept his rival's social reforms, nationalized the banks, granted women the right to vote and full citizenship to the Afro-descendant population of the Caribbean, and outlawed the Communist Party for a time. Above all, on December 1, 1948, he abolished the army in a gesture almost unique in the world: he symbolically knocked down a wall of the Bellavista Barracks —today the National Museum— with a sledgehammer and handed the building over to culture. The measure was enshrined in the 1949 Constitution. With no armed forces to threaten civilian power, Costa Rica could pour its resources into education and health.
The second half of the 20th century confirmed Costa Rica as an exception in Central America. While Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala tore themselves apart in dictatorships, revolutions and civil wars, the country built the most stable democracy in the region, with clean elections, peaceful alternation in power and an independent Supreme Electoral Tribunal. With the money it did not spend on weapons, the state developed a broad public health system, made primary and secondary education universal and created public universities, reaching literacy and life-expectancy figures close to those of the developed world. That model earned it the nickname 'Switzerland of Central America'.
The country's international prestige peaked in 1987, when President Óscar Arias Sánchez received the Nobel Peace Prize. Arias had promoted a plan to pacify Central America, set out in the Esquipulas II Accords, signed on August 7, 1987, by the five Central American presidents, which laid the groundwork for ending the region's wars through democratization, ceasefires and an end to support for irregular forces. Arias used the prize money to create the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress.
The economy, meanwhile, diversified. From the 1980s and 1990s on, the country reduced its dependence on coffee and bananas and bet on attracting foreign investment, on high-technology industry —with the arrival of Intel in 1997 as a landmark—, on services and, very particularly, on tourism. Costa Rica was leaving behind the agro-export economy of the 19th century to face, with its educated human capital and its stability, the global economy of the 21st.
The best-known trait of contemporary Costa Rica is its environmental commitment. After suffering one of the highest deforestation rates on the planet in the mid-20th century, the country made a bold turn: from the 1970s on it created an extensive system of national parks and reserves that today protects around a quarter of its territory. Pioneering initiatives included the Cabo Blanco Absolute Nature Reserve (1963), the country's first protected area, and the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve (1972), founded with the backing of American Quaker settlers who had arrived in 1951. Programs such as payment for environmental services also managed to reverse deforestation and helped the country recover much of its forest cover.
The reward was turning its astonishing biodiversity into the engine of a new economy. Costa Rica is home to about 5 to 6% of the planet's species on barely 0.03% of its land surface, and that wealth of volcanoes, cloud forests, reefs and beaches on two oceans made it a model destination for world ecotourism. National Geographic magazine went so far as to describe Corcovado National Park, on the Osa Peninsula, as 'the most biologically intense place on Earth'. At the same time, the country moved toward an electricity mix generated almost entirely —more than 98%— from renewable sources, and set itself the goal of decarbonizing its economy by 2050.
All of that identity is condensed in two words Costa Ricans use every day to greet one another, to say thanks or to say that all is well: 'pura vida'. That philosophy of calm and well-being even has a surprising demographic expression: the Nicoya Peninsula, in Guanacaste, is recognized as one of the world's five 'Blue Zones', regions where people live exceptionally long lives. A country without an army, democratic, biodiverse and long-lived, Costa Rica has turned its history of peripheral poverty into a brand recognized around the world.
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The name Alajuela comes from 'La Lajuela' or 'Las Lajuelas', a diminutive of 'laja', the flat, elongated stones of the river that ran through the spot. The place is already mentioned in documents from 1657, settled by colonists from the western Central Valley long before it was formally founded.
The town was founded on October 12, 1782, when Bishop Esteban Lorenzo de Tristán opened an oratory in the hamlet of La Alajuela, between the Ciruelas and Alajuela rivers, and laid out a grid so that the scattered farmers would gather around the church. Popularly known as 'la ciudad de los mangos' (the city of mangoes) for the trees in its central park, Alajuela grew as a farming and trading town in a fertile coffee-growing district.
Alajuela is, above all, the birthplace of Juan Santamaría, Costa Rica's greatest hero. The son of a humble washerwoman, this young drummer boy nicknamed 'el Erizo' joined the troops that in 1856 marched into Nicaragua to fight William Walker's filibusters, answering the call of President Juan Rafael Mora Porras.
At the Second Battle of Rivas, on April 11, 1856, Santamaría volunteered to set fire with a torch to the inn where the invaders had entrenched themselves, a feat in which he lost his life and which proved decisive for the victory. His memory, honored in the historical and cultural museum that bears his name, in a famous monument and in the country's international airport, makes Alajuela a central place in Costa Rican patriotic memory.
In the highlands of the province rises Poás Volcano, one of the most spectacular and accessible craters in the country, with a hot lake of acidic water and active fumaroles that make it one of the most visited national parks. On its slopes and in the mountains of Bajos del Toro unfold waterfalls, cloud forests and the coffee and strawberry farms of the western Central Valley.
Alajuela is also the cradle of Costa Rican craftwork par excellence. The town of Sarchí is famous worldwide for its ox carts hand-painted with brightly colored geometric and floral motifs, a tradition declared a symbol of national labor and recognized by Unesco as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Nearby, Zarcero surprises visitors with the whimsical sculpted cypress bushes of its park, another classic image of the province.
To the north, the province drops from the Central Valley to the warm Northern Plains, a world of jungle, rivers and volcanoes. Its great icon is Arenal Volcano, whose almost perfect cone dominated the landscape for decades: after lying dormant for centuries, it entered a violent eruption in 1968 that destroyed villages and kept it active until 2010.
At its foot, La Fortuna became Costa Rica's great center for adventure tourism and hot springs, with ziplines, waterfalls and volcanic thermal spas. It is the gateway to one of the country's most visited regions, where the volcano's geothermal energy can be felt in every hot spring.
The far north of the province, along the border with Nicaragua, is a more agricultural and unvarnished Costa Rica of cattle ranches, pineapple and sugarcane plantations, and lush biodiversity. There lie internationally famous wetlands such as the Caño Negro National Wildlife Refuge, a paradise of waterbirds, caimans and turtles fed by the Frío River.
To the west, rural towns like Bijagua serve as a base for exploring Tenorio Volcano National Park and its jewel, the Río Celeste, whose waters take on an astonishing turquoise color through an optical phenomenon linked to volcanic minerals. Waterfalls, lagoons and forests round out a northern zone that shows the wildest, least urban face of the province.
Cartago is the oldest city in Costa Rica. It was founded in 1563 by the conquistador Juan Vázquez de Coronado in the fertile Guarco Valley, and named after the ancient Mediterranean Carthage. Its town council, created that same year, is the oldest in the country, and for almost the whole colonial period the city was the center of Spanish power in the province.
Cartago was the capital of Costa Rica for more than two and a half centuries, until 1823. That year, after independence and the War of Ochomogo between the cities of the Central Valley, the capital passed to San José. From that past the city keeps its standing as the historical cradle of the nation, even if little of its colonial architecture has survived the earthquakes.
The history of Cartago is marked by tremors. Sitting at the foot of Irazú Volcano, the city was damaged or destroyed again and again over the centuries, in 1656, 1718, 1822, 1841 and, above all, in the catastrophic Santa Mónica earthquake, on the night of May 4, 1910.
That quake, considered the most destructive in Costa Rican history, lasted only a few seconds but flattened the city and left at least 700 dead. Its most visible mark are the famous Ruinas de Cartago, the walls of a parish church left unfinished after the disaster, which today, turned into a garden, preside over the city center as a memorial to that tragedy.
Cartago is the spiritual heart of Costa Rica. There stands the Basilica of Our Lady of Los Ángeles, which guards the image of La Negrita, patron saint of the country, a small dark stone carving that, according to tradition, appeared in 1635 to a humble girl named Juana Pereira.
Every August 2, the Romería pilgrimage draws more than a million pilgrims who come on foot from all over the country —many walk the more than twenty kilometers between San José and Cartago— to venerate the Virgin. It is one of the largest displays of faith in Central America and defines a good part of Costa Rican cultural identity.
The province of Cartago is a land of volcanoes and fertile valleys. Irazú Volcano, at 3,432 meters the highest in the country, offers from its barren crater, on exceptionally clear days, a simultaneous view of the Caribbean and the Pacific. Its ash, which in the past buried harvests, today fertilizes the slopes planted with potatoes, onions and vegetables that supply the country.
A few kilometers away, the peaceful Orosi Valley preserves some of the oldest colonial churches in Costa Rica —such as San José de Orosi, from 1743— and coffee plantations among the country's most venerable, in one of the most picturesque landscapes of the Central Valley. Rivers, hot springs and lookout points complete a district of deep colonial roots.
On the slopes of Turrialba Volcano lies the Guayabo National Monument, the most important archaeological site in Costa Rica. It was a pre-Columbian chiefdom city, settled from around 1000 BC and at its height by about AD 800, which came to hold some ten thousand inhabitants before being mysteriously abandoned around 1400. Its cobbled causeways, mounds, bridges and aqueducts —many of which still carry water— are astonishing feats of engineering and stand as testimony to the Chibcha cultures of the region.
Turrialba is also famous the world over for the Pacuare River, considered one of the planet's best rafting destinations, with rapids running between walls of jungle. Together with its namesake cheese and its farming tradition, this makes the eastern part of the province a wild counterpoint to the Central Valley.
Long before the annexation to Costa Rica, the North Pacific region was the southern edge of the Mesoamerican world. From around AD 800, the Chorotega people dominated Greater Nicoya: maize farmers, skilled potters and traders whose language and cultural influence reached down from Mesoamerica. Their legacy lives on in the traditional pottery of towns such as San Vicente and Guaitil, still made with ancestral techniques, and in the Chorotega Indigenous territory of Matambú.
This is the Costa Rica of savanna and tropical dry forest, a seasonal ecosystem —green in the rainy season, golden and leafless in the dry one— of which few remnants survive in the world. Guanacaste protects the most important ones in Central America within its great national parks, a refuge for deer, monkeys, wild cats and birds.
Guanacaste has a singular origin: it was not always Costa Rican. Until independence, the Partido de Nicoya belonged to Nicaragua's orbit. On July 25, 1824, in an open town council held in the city of Nicoya, the residents of Nicoya and Santa Cruz voted to annex themselves to Costa Rica 'de la patria por nuestra voluntad' ('of the homeland by our own will'), a decision celebrated every year as one of the great national dates.
The town of Guanacaste —today's Liberia—, settled by landowners of Spanish descent, abstained at first and only became part of Costa Rica in 1829, by law of the Central American Federal Congress. From that Partido de Nicoya came the present-day province, whose name comes from the leafy guanacaste tree, today the national tree. Liberia, its capital, known as the 'Ciudad Blanca' (White City) for its whitewashed adobe houses, still carries the air of that colonial and savanna tradition.
Guanacaste is the cradle of the folklore Costa Rica recognizes as its own. From its cattle ranches and from the figure of the sabanero —the local cowboy who drives the herds across the plains between the Tempisque River and the border— came a good part of the symbols the country regards as its traditional identity: the Punto Guanacasteco, declared the national dance; the marimba; the maize-based dishes; and the traditions of the towns of Nicoya and Santa Cruz, the latter recognized as the National Folkloric City.
Cattle ranching, introduced in colonial times, shaped the landscape and the culture of the province. The great estates of the north and the more evenly divided lands of the south gave form to a rural society of strong character, whose civic festivals, horse parades (topes) and Costa Rican-style bullfights still liven up every Guanacaste town.
The volcanic nature of Guanacaste is as remarkable as its beaches. Rincón de la Vieja National Park, in the Guanacaste mountain range, surprises visitors with fumaroles, pots of boiling mud, hot springs and waterfalls, a geothermal festival among forests that shelter pumas and tapirs. Nearby, Miravalles Volcano feeds some of the country's major geothermal power plants.
Historic Santa Rosa National Park combines natural and historical value: at its Casona ranch house, on March 20, 1856, the Battle of Santa Rosa was fought, in which the Costa Rican army defeated William Walker's filibusters in minutes, one of the founding episodes of nationhood. Today it protects one of the last great dry forests in Central America and beaches where sea turtles nest.
The coast of Guanacaste, on the North Pacific, is Costa Rica's great tourist showcase: kilometers of pale sand and warm water, from the Gulf of Papagayo to the Nicoya Peninsula. Playas del Coco, Flamingo, Conchal, Tamarindo, Sámara and Nosara have become icons of sun, surf and rest, served by Liberia's Daniel Oduber international airport, which brings direct flights from all over the Americas.
This coastal strip is going through intense tourism and real estate development, yet it keeps corners of calm and nature. To its scenic value is added a human and unique one: the Nicoya Peninsula is one of the planet's five 'Blue Zones', regions where people live exceptionally long lives, with numerous centenarians in cantons such as Nicoya, Hojancha and Nandayure. That longevity has given Guanacaste worldwide fame as a land of well-being, and has driven a flourishing health tourism and nature retreat business.
The city of Heredia was born at the start of the 18th century, when emigrants from Cartago founded a chapel in 1706 at a spot called Elvirilla. Around 1716-1717 the settlement moved to a site the natives called Cubujuquí, and in 1736 the parish of the Immaculate Conception was established there; its church still presides over the central park alongside the peculiar fortín, one of the few of its kind in the country.
Known as the 'City of Flowers', Heredia is one of the towns that best preserves the atmosphere of colonial, coffee-growing Costa Rica. The villages around it —Barva, Santo Domingo, San Isidro, San Rafael— keep the quiet look of those farming towns of the Central Valley.
Heredia grew as the center of a rich coffee-growing region and still keeps coffee plantations on its slopes, alongside strawberry fields and ornamental plants. The 'golden bean' brought the province prosperity and an identity tied to the land that can still be felt on its farms and in its coffee mills.
But if anything sets Heredia apart, it is its vocation for education. As early as 1751 Bishop Pedro Agustín Morel de Santa Cruz founded there one of the first schools in the province; in time, the old San Agustín school gave rise to the Normal School of Costa Rica, the country's great trainer of teachers, and from that root the National University (UNA) was born in 1973, giving the city a young, university character.
The province climbs from the valley toward the Barva Volcano —whose name recalls the Indigenous chief Barvak, who ruled the area before the conquest—, now part of the great Braulio Carrillo National Park. This park, one of the most important and closest to the capital, protects one of the largest expanses of cloud forest and rainforest in the country, crossed by the spectacular highway that drops down toward the Caribbean.
Its coffee slopes give way to rainforest-covered mountains, waterfalls and remarkable biodiversity only a few kilometers from the city. That band of high ground has made Heredia a province of contrasts, between the urban life of the Central Valley and the lush nature of its summits.
To the north, the province drops sharply to the Northern Plains, in the canton of Sarapiquí, a world of humid tropical rainforest cut through by powerful rivers. The region was a pioneer in the study and conservation of Costa Rica's rainforest: it is home to the famous La Selva Biological Station, run by the Organization for Tropical Studies, one of the leading tropical forest research centers in the world, alongside reserves that draw scientists and ecotourists from across the planet.
Sarapiquí is today a destination for rafting, canopy tours, birdwatching and rural tourism, showing the wildest and most biodiverse face of the province, very different from the placid Central Valley. Its rivers, once trade routes into the interior, are now a stage for adventure and nature.
In recent decades, Heredia has gone through a remarkable economic transformation. Cantons such as Belén, Barreal, Flores and San Rafael, right in the Central Valley, became a hub of free trade zones, industrial parks and service and high-technology companies that drew foreign investment into the country. The best-remembered milestone was the arrival, around 1997-1998, of a large Intel plant in Belén, which drove the export of microprocessors and marked Costa Rica's turn toward a knowledge economy.
That development turned the small province into one of the modern engines of the Greater Metropolitan Area, with high levels of skilled employment and a strong presence of technology and medical device multinationals. In just a few kilometers, Heredia combines the memory of coffee-growing Costa Rica with the country's most globalized and contemporary face.
The modern history of Limón was born with the railway. To export coffee through the Atlantic, in 1871 the Costa Rican government took on the building of the Railway to the Caribbean, a titanic undertaking through the rainforest. After the first contractors failed, it fell to the American businessman Minor Cooper Keith, who in exchange for completing the line —finished in 1890— obtained enormous land concessions and the right to operate the port and the railway for decades.
That undertaking gave birth to the city and port of Limón as the country's main outlet to the Atlantic, and in time the province was formally created in 1902. Laying the tracks in a setting of endless rain, yellow fever and malaria cost thousands of lives and required importing labor from many origins, which changed the human make-up of the Caribbean forever.
Along the railway tracks, Minor Keith planted bananas, first as cheap food for the laborers and later as a colossal business. Out of those plantations the United Fruit Company was born in 1899, and for decades it dominated the economy and much of the political life of the Caribbean side of the country.
The 'banana enclave' brought jobs, railways and foreign currency, but also dependence and bitter labor conflicts, such as the historic banana strike of 1934, which fought for the rights of thousands of workers. When blight and soil exhaustion hit the Caribbean plantations, the company moved much of its production to the South Pacific, leaving a deep economic and social mark on Limón.
Afro-Antillean labor was brought in to build the railway, above all from Jamaica. On December 20, 1872, the schooner Lizzie reached the port of Limón with the first contingents from Kingston, followed by thousands of workers from other Caribbean islands. Out of that encounter came the vibrant Afro-Costa Rican culture: its Limonese Creole English, its calypso and reggae, its cooking of 'rice and beans' simmered in coconut milk and its colorful carnival.
For decades that Afro-descendant population suffered discriminatory laws that even barred it from moving to the Central Valley. That changed with the constitutional reform pushed through after 1948, which recognized full citizenship for Afro-Costa Ricans. Today, figures such as the writer Quince Duncan or the vice president Epsy Campbell reflect the weight of this community in the national identity.
The South Caribbean, in the canton of Talamanca, holds the largest Indigenous population in the country. In the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca —the highest and most rugged in Costa Rica— live the Bribris and Cabécares, peoples of Chibcha language and culture organized in matrilineal clans who keep their worldview, their territories and their traditions alive. It is the most ethnically diverse region in the country, where Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean and mestizo peoples live side by side.
Coastal towns such as Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Cahuita, Manzanillo and Playa Cocles combine that Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean bedrock with a laid-back setting of beaches, coral reefs —protected in Cahuita National Park and the Gandoca-Manzanillo Refuge— and a bohemian atmosphere that draws travelers from all over the world. Reggae, surf and calm set the pulse of this coast.
The northern Caribbean of the province is home to one of the country's most singular ecosystems: Tortuguero, a maze of canals, lagoons and tropical rainforest reachable only by boat or small plane, which has earned it the nickname of the 'Costa Rican Amazon'. Its National Park is one of the main nesting sites of the Caribbean green turtle, a natural spectacle that draws thousands of visitors every year between July and October.
Among navigable canals, manatees, caimans and dazzling birdlife, Tortuguero embodies Costa Rica's environmental bet: a former logging and turtle-hunting outpost turned, from the 1970s onward, into a wildlife sanctuary and a model of community ecotourism that today supports the towns of the area.
The city of Puntarenas stretches along a long, narrow spit of sand in the Gulf of Nicoya, facing the peninsula. Declared a major port in 1814 by order of the Cortes of Cádiz, through the 19th century it was Costa Rica's great Pacific port and the main outlet for coffee to the markets of the world, especially after the works to improve the landing stage carried out between 1840 and 1850.
'The Port', as it is known, had its heyday when coffee came up by oxcart from the Central Valley to be shipped to Europe by way of the Pacific. The opening of the railway to the Atlantic in 1890 diverted much of that trade to the Caribbean, but Puntarenas kept its role as a port and also became the traditional seaside resort of the people of San José, who arrived by train to bathe in the sea. The present province was created as such in 1909, when the country was reorganized into seven provinces.
Puntarenas is the largest province of Costa Rica and the one with the most peculiar geography: it stretches like a long, broken strip along nearly the whole Pacific coastline, from the Gulf of Nicoya to the border with Panama, and takes in inland areas, peninsulas and islands. That elongated shape makes it the province with the greatest variety of coastal landscapes in the country.
It also takes in islands of the Gulf of Nicoya and the remote Cocos Island, far out in the Pacific Ocean, a World Heritage Site and a mecca of world diving. A single province holds mangroves, mountain cloud forests, adventure beaches and the most intact tropical rainforest in Central America.
In the mountains of the Cordillera de Tilarán, the Monteverde region —with the village of Santa Elena— is home to the famous cloud forests, mist-wrapped ecosystems of extraordinary biodiversity. Their history has a singular origin: in 1951, a group of American Quaker families, pacifists fleeing military service during the Korean War, settled on these heights to live in peace and take up dairy farming.
In 1972, those settlers, together with conservation scientists, founded the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve to protect the water sources and the high-altitude forest. The result was one of the great sanctuaries of world ecotourism, birthplace of the canopy tour or zipline, refuge of the quetzal and the bellbird, and a model of how conservation can live alongside tourism.
Along the Central Pacific coast come some of the most visited destinations in the country, one after another. Jacó is the beach resort closest to the capital, lively and given over to surfing; Herradura holds marinas and resorts; and Carara National Park, at the mouth of the Tárcoles river, is a refuge of scarlet macaws and crocodiles where the dry forests of the north meet the wet forests of the south.
Farther south, Quepos and Manuel Antonio National Park offer the most famous postcard of Costa Rica: rainforest full of monkeys, sloths and iguanas running straight down to beaches of white sand and turquoise water. It is one of the smallest and at the same time most visited parks in the country, a symbol of Costa Rican nature tourism, and the gateway to a region that once lived off United Fruit's bananas.
The far south of Puntarenas is the most remote and wildest Costa Rica. The Osa Peninsula holds Corcovado National Park, described by National Geographic magazine as 'the most biologically intense place on Earth': the largest tropical rainforest on the Central American Pacific, home to tapirs, jaguars, peccaries, macaws and unmatched biodiversity. It is reached by way of towns such as Puerto Jiménez, on the Golfo Dulce, or by the remote Drake Bay, and from there on to Caño Island.
Farther north, the Costa Ballena —Uvita, Dominical and Ballena Marine National Park, with its famous 'whale's tail' of sand— rounds out a south of unspoiled beaches and whale watching. At the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, already under the jurisdiction of Puntarenas, Santa Teresa, Mal País and Montezuma have become meccas of surfing and bohemian tourism, alongside the pioneering Cabo Blanco Absolute Natural Reserve, created in 1963 as the country's first protected area.
Before the Spanish arrived, the lands of what is now the central canton of San José were inhabited by Huetar peoples and groups subject to them, such as the Tices and Catapas, while the valleys to the south, in the region of El General, belonged to the world of the Brunkas. It was an area of forests and rivers in the heart of the Central Valley, with no large population centers.
For much of the colonial period, the scattered settlers of the Aserrí valley depended on Cartago in religious and political matters, but distance and bad roads made that dependence hard to sustain. So in 1736 the church authorities ordered a chapel built at a spot known as the 'Boca del Monte' to bring the neighbors together: the following year, in 1737, the first adobe chapel was raised and the first local authority appointed, a date taken as the founding of San José.
For decades San José was a modest town, overshadowed by neighboring Cartago. Its takeoff came with coffee: it was on the lands of San José that the 'golden bean' first prospered, and the wealth it generated drove the city's growth. In 1813 it received the title of city thanks to the efforts of the priest Florencio del Castillo before the Cortes of Cádiz.
The decisive leap came after independence. In the War of Ochomogo in 1823, the forces of San José, supporters of a republican regime, prevailed over those of Cartago, and as a result the capital of the State was moved to San José that same year. From then on, the city concentrated ever more of the country's political, economic and cultural power.
Through the 19th century, the coffee elite made San José the showcase of its prosperity. Coffee earnings paid for street lighting, streetcars, the first monumental buildings and a refined urban life that sought to imitate the capitals of Europe.
The symbol of that ambition is the National Theater, opened in 1897 and inspired by the great theaters of Paris and Milan. Financed in part by a tax on coffee, it became the pride of the city and an emblem of all Costa Rica. Around it flourished the San José of museums, markets and cafés that is still the country's gateway: there stand the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum, the Jade Museum and the National Museum, housed in the old Bellavista Barracks where the army was abolished in 1948.
The province of San José spreads across the heart of the Central Valley, the plateau of volcanic soils and temperate climate where most of the Costa Rican population lives and where the country's economic activity is concentrated. Its capital forms, together with Alajuela, Heredia and Cartago, the Greater Metropolitan Area, the urban core of Costa Rica.
Around the capital, coffee-growing cantons and mountain ranges frame the valley. To the south, the province climbs the Cordillera de Talamanca in an abrupt change of scenery: asphalt gives way to high-altitude forests and to the most rugged páramos in Central America, a transition that sums up the country's surprising diversity in a few hours on the road.
At the southern end of the province rises Cerro Chirripó, at 3,820 meters the highest point in Costa Rica. Its summit of páramo, glacial lakes and ice-carved rock is won after a demanding hike that starts at San Gerardo de Rivas, and on clear days it offers the rare sight of both oceans from a single spot. It is one of the country's great mountaineering challenges and forms part of Chirripó National Park, which belongs to the enormous La Amistad reserve, shared with Panama.
Farther west, hemmed in by the mountains, the valley of San Gerardo de Dota has become famous among birdwatchers: it is one of the best places in the world to see the resplendent quetzal, the sacred bird of the Mesoamerican peoples. Forests of centuries-old oaks, cold trout streams and a mountain climate make this area a haven of nature a few hours from the capital, proof of the contrast that defines the province.