🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Caribbean
Puerto Limón (officially Limón) is the main city and port on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast and the capital of the province of Limón. Founded as a port in the 19th century, it was the doorway through which the railway, bananas and much of the Afro-Antillean population that gave the Costa Rican Caribbean its unique identity arrived. Today it's a bustling, multicultural port city, the country's main cruise stop and the center of a vibrant Afro-Caribbean culture, famous for its carnival.
Although many travelers use it only as a waypoint toward the Southern Caribbean beaches (Cahuita, Puerto Viejo, Manzanillo) or toward the Tortuguero canals to the north, the city has a character of its own: Vargas Park with its sloths, the seafront promenade, the market, Caribbean architecture, calypso and reggae, and delicious Afro-Caribbean cooking. Off the coast lies Uvita Island, where tradition places Christopher Columbus's landing on his fourth voyage.
This guide covers the essentials of Puerto Limón with a practical eye: the city and its Caribbean heritage, the carnival, Afro-Caribbean culture and food, its role as a base for the Southern Caribbean and Tortuguero, where to sleep and eat, and how to get here and get around. A portrait of Costa Rica's Caribbean, mixed-race, musical side.
Puerto Limón was founded as a port in the second half of the 19th century and grew with the building of the Atlantic Railway and the banana boom, which drew thousands of Afro-Antillean workers (mostly Jamaicans), forging the region's Afro-Caribbean identity. Tradition places Christopher Columbus's 1502 landing, during his fourth voyage, off its coast at Uvita Island. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Costa Rican Caribbean: the province of the railway and the banana, cradle of Afro-Caribbean culture and of the Bribri and Cabécar peoples, land of Tortuguero and its turtles, of coral reefs and of an atmosphere of reggae, calypso and 'rice and beans' that looks like no other Costa Rica.
Read the history of Limón →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
European history on Costa Rica's Caribbean side begins, by tradition, off the coast of what is today Puerto Limón. In 1502, on his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus is said to have reached a small islet near the shore, today known as Isla Uvita, where his fleet took shelter. Accounts of the gold ornaments worn by the Indigenous people of the region are said to have helped forge the idea of a 'costa rica' (rich coast), an expression that, according to tradition, would give the country its name.
Before the Europeans arrived, the Caribbean region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples, among them those who occupied the territory of Talamanca. The area, with its dense jungle, heavy rain and humid climate, stayed relatively outside the main Spanish centers of power through the colonial period, since those sat in the Central Valley, and that kept it thinly populated and isolated for centuries.
Only in the 19th century, with independence and the rise of coffee as an export crop, did the need appear for a Caribbean port to ship production to European markets by a more direct route than the Pacific one. That need would lead to the founding and the growth of Puerto Limón as the country's great Atlantic port.
Puerto Limón took hold in the second half of the 19th century as the Caribbean port, and its growth was bound up with one of the great works of Costa Rican history: the building of the Atlantic Railway, meant to connect the coffee-growing Central Valley with the Caribbean port. The undertaking, led by figures such as Minor C. Keith, was extraordinarily hard because of the jungle, the diseases and the terrain; thousands of workers are estimated to have died during its construction.
To build the railway and, later, to work the banana plantations that grew up around it, thousands of foreign workers were hired, especially Afro-Antilleans from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. That immigration completely transformed the makeup of Limón's population: the region became mostly Afro-Caribbean, with a language of its own (creole English), its own music, religion and cooking.
Bananas also gave rise to the United Fruit Company, which dominated the economy of the area and of much of Central America. For decades, however, the Afro-Costa Rican population of Limón faced restrictions and discrimination, including limits on moving to the Central Valley. Only in the 20th century were their citizenship rights fully recognized. Today that Afro-Caribbean heritage, forged in the port, the railway and the banana, is one of Costa Rica's great cultural legacies.
Through the first half of the 20th century, Limón's economy turned on bananas and on the power of the United Fruit Company, which controlled plantations, the railway, trade and much of life in the province. Working conditions on the banana estates were very harsh, and the region was the stage for some of the most important social conflicts in Costa Rican history, such as the great banana strike of 1934, led in part by the communist leader Carlos Luis Fallas (Calufa), which demanded better wages and conditions for workers.
Afro-Caribbean workers were central to these struggles, though they also faced a double discrimination: as laborers and for their origin. One of the great injustices of the period was the de facto ban on Afro-Costa Ricans moving to the Central Valley when United Fruit shifted part of its production to the South Pacific, leaving the Black population tied to a province in crisis.
The picture began to change after the Civil War of 1948 and the new Constitution of 1949, which enshrined full citizenship and rights for the Afro-Costa Rican population. The novel 'Mamita Yunai', by Carlos Luis Fallas, immortalized the hardships of the Caribbean banana workers and became a classic of Latin American social literature. That memory of exploitation and resistance is a fundamental part of Limón identity.
In the second half of the 20th century, Puerto Limón established itself as the main port terminal of the Costa Rican Caribbean, the gateway for much of the country's exports (bananas, pineapple, coffee) and for a large share of its imports. The Limón-Moín port complex is strategic for the national economy today, and since 2019 it has had a modern container terminal (TCM) run under an international concession, on top of being the country's main cruise port.
In 1949 the educator and musician Alfred Josiah Henry Smith, known as 'Mister King', created the Carnaval de Limón, inspired by Caribbean traditions, to celebrate Día de la Raza (today Día de las Culturas, October 12). Over time the carnival became the biggest Afro-Caribbean festival in Costa Rica, with comparsas, parades, calypso, reggae and soca, and a symbol of Limón cultural pride.
Despite its cultural wealth and its economic weight, the province of Limón has historically carried lower social indicators than the rest of the country, the result of inherited isolation and inequality. In recent decades, tourism (the Southern Caribbean, Tortuguero, the nature parks) and port investment have tried to reinvigorate the region. Limón remains, above all, the Afro-Caribbean heartbeat of Costa Rica: a city of music, sea, bananas and memory.
Puerto Limón is not only port and carnival: it is also the doorway to one of the coastlines richest in wildlife in Costa Rica. North of the city, where the rivers and canals tangle with the jungle, lies Tortuguero, the largest green turtle nesting site in the whole Caribbean. Its name, 'place of turtles', is no accident: every year, between July and October, hundreds of green turtles come out at night onto the black-sand beaches to lay their eggs, a spectacle that goes back long before tourism existed. For centuries those same turtles were hunted almost to collapse, for their meat and their shells.
The turn came through a scientist: the American zoologist Archie Carr, who studied the Tortuguero turtles in the 1950s and understood that they were disappearing. In 1959 he founded the Caribbean Conservation Corporation (today the Sea Turtle Conservancy), which has monitored the nestings ever since —the longest continuous sea turtle tracking program in the world— and which was key to Costa Rica creating Tortuguero National Park in 1970, protecting the largest green turtle colony in the hemisphere. Carr's work turned this Caribbean coast into a world reference in marine conservation.
South of Limón, the story is completed by Cahuita National Park and the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, which protect the few living coral reefs of the Costa Rican Caribbean, white-sand beaches and mangroves, along a stretch of coast with a strong Afro-Caribbean identity. Between the turtles of the north, the corals of the south and the jungle that runs down to the sea, Puerto Limón turns out to be much more than a cruise stop: it is the capital and the gateway to the natural and cultural Caribbean of Costa Rica.