Costa Rica Travel Posters - Palm Trees on Playa Guiones Beach

Playa Guiones Beach, Nosara, Nicoya Peninsula, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica
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Bananas, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and honey all come out of Costa Rica, a country with no army and compulsory education. Here orchids bloom all year round and there are forests of rosewood, cedar and mahogany. Visitors can climb volcanoes and view two oceans, hunt jaguar, tapirs, ocelot and deer, go mining for gold, or fish for black marlin, tarpan, sawfish and lobster.

Country Briefing

Size: 19,883 square miles
Capital: San Jose
Population: 4,301,712
Climate: The dry season, December - May, is the best time to visit, but the climate is agreeable all year round.
Government; A republic.
Language: Spanish. English, German, French, Dutch and Italian frequently heard.
Religion: Roman Catholic, but other denominations represented.
Public Holidays: New Year's Day, 1 Jan; Feast of St Joseph, 19 Mar; Anniversary of the Battle of Rivas, 11 Apr; Easter, Labor Day, 1 May; Corpus Christi, June; St Peter and St Paul, 29 Jun; Anniversary of the Annexation of Guanacaste Province, 5 Jul; Our Lady of Angels, 2 Aug; Assumption and Mother's Day, 15 Aug; Independence Day, 15 Sep; Columbus Day, 12 Oct; Immaculate Conception, 8 Dec; Christmas Day, 25 Dec

Santa Maria International Airport is 11 miles from San Jose. Buses are frequent. Taxis plentiful. Airport departure tax, Duty free shop and hotel reservation counter.

For help in finding accommodations there is the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo, Calle Alfredo Volio, Avenidas 4 / 6, Apartado 777, San Jose. Inexpensive pensiones available.

Hotels in San Jose

Balmoral Avenida Central, Calles 7/9
Europa Calle Central, 5a Avenida
Irazu PO Box 962
President Avenida Central, Calles 7/9
Royal Dutch PO Box 4258
Crystal PO Box 5570, Autopista Wilson
Amstel Calle, 7, Avenidas 10/12
Gran Costa Rica 3a Calle, Avenidas Central / 2
Diplomat Calle 6, Avenidas Oriente / 2
Pension Canada Calle 9, Avenida 9, Casa No 779
Plaza Avenida Central, Calles 2/4

When giving directions the Costa Rican will give distances not in blocks, or yards, but in varas - a vara is some 33 inches.

Passport or Tourisst Visa Card (valid for 30 days) available from Costa Rican Consulates, plus means of identification and tickets for onward travel and a smallpox vaccination certificate. The visa is free for US and UK citizens. No currency restrictions and no customs declaration necessary for passengers carrying only personal effects. Duty free allowance; up to three liters of wine or spirits: half kilogram tobacoo in any form, and other items not exceeding USD 500 as a taxable amount.

Banana Guatemala Honduras Costa Rica Panama

American republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica, are now the commercial banana centers of the world. But the real homeland of the crop is completely around the globe from these points, in Southern Asia, most likely in the hot wet valleys of India, where Alexander the Great encountered the crop during his conquests and described it as a crop whose seed was even then completely sterile. Having underwritten numerous dynasties and civilizations of Asia and the Orient, the non-American banana, carried to the New World in 1516 by a Spanish missionary priest, now contributes to the national economies of about a third of all American republics.

The name "banana" is neither Asiatic nor American. It is taken from a Negro dialect once current along the Guinea Coast of Africa where the plant was reputedly carried via dried-root trade from India. That lowland India was botanical home of the banana is borne out by sculptures and friezes to be seen on the walls of the Stupa of Barhut, a Buddhist monument of lower India presumably built about 175 B.C. This is probably the oldest-known representation of the fruit. But references to bananas appear frequently in Chinese writings of the Tang dynasty which were contemporary with the Early Christian Era. Chinese physicians brewed medicines from the roots of the plant; the fruit was considered a precious food and tonic, and stalk fibers were used for weaving mats.

It is probable that by the beginning of the Christian Era, banana roots were a well-established commerce of the Polynesians, having been carried by primitive ocean craft from Malayan coasts and Indonesia throughout the South Sea Islands and even to the mainlands of northeast Australia. Thus the banana circled the equator and became perhaps the nearest universal fruit of tropical man.

In 1698 Thomas Gage, soldier of fortune, commented in his report, A New Survey of the West Indies: ". . . our chief care . . . was to look to our bananas . . . The fruit pleased us all exceedingly, judging it to be as good or better as any fruit in Spain. It is not gathered ripe from the trees; but being gathered green, it is hung up some days, and so ripens and grows yellow and mellow, and every bit as sweet as honey . . ."

Writing from Cairo, Egypt, in 1831, to his sister Sarah in England, the ever-cautious Disraeli said, "...the most delicious thing in the world is a banana."

A few decades later the journals of Livingstone and Stanley tell how for almost two years Stanley and the white men of his expedition lived largely on banana flour cooked into thin gruel. For centuries there has been voluminous testimony of the banana's importance as food for tropical man and beast. It is one of the few crops to become a staff of life for man and beast alike. Fed green to livestock, the banana approximates the nutritive worth of grass and grain since starch and mineral content of the unripened pulp compare with those of grain, while the green skins are a valuable source of chlorophyll. Livestock economy of many tropical lands is considerably dependent on bananas.

But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that business minds began to realize the possibilities of bananas as a food for peoples of temperate zones. Now that these possibilities are at last being realized, the banana awakens to new and momentous social and political significances.

For today the banana is the greatest of all export fruits, a premier American business card in international trade and the one American export crop whose volume and consumption range is rapidly growing during a decade of embattled nationalism. This is another paradox with yellow skin.

Not content with exploding numerous gospels of botany, transportation, and foreign trade or the bizarre feat of hoisting a once lowly agriculture to an international post in shipping, government, and social institutions, the unique banana now begins to devise a distinctive trade arithmetic.

Costa Rica Port Limón

Costa Rica is, therefore, a land agriculturally important and varied in climate, soil and altitude. All about at Port Limón is a Costa Rica green and hot and flat, but back from the sea are hills, long, green hills, and in the interior mountains and deep valleys, mountains of rock and earth, upturned by volcanic action, perhaps, but not volcanic in the sense that the predominating note is the sharp, thin peak of the volcanic cone. Real volcanic peaks are there, too, and indeed they will be the dominating factor of landscape after we reach the summit of the mountain range, but they are not the mountain range itself. Costa Rica is like the temperate countries in its mountains, while it is like the tropics in the endless green that covers those mountains.

Like all the countries of Central America, Costa Rica has a broad plain on the Atlantic or Caribbean side, a gradual rise to the table-land in the centre of the cordillera (where it is from 3,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea) and a sharp descent to a narrow plain on the Pacific shore. On the Caribbean coast the soil is the sand and mould of innumerable generations of tropical forest, on the table-land it is soft red clayey loam of much richness--the "red earth" of agricultural wealth --and on the Pacific a black volcanic sand tingeing even the beaches of the ocean furnishes the rich, porous sponge of volcanic silt.

From Port Limón the journey is only 104 miles up the mountainside to San José, the capital,--but it takes all day! It always takes all day to make a journey in the tropics. What with the wisdom of men who have learned that although hurry may get us along faster, it will not take us so far; what with the natural difficulties of keeping a railroad in record-making repair when during six months of the year the daily rain comes down with approximately the gentleness of a fire-hose; and what with the fact that there is no need to hurry.

Seated in the train, however, we find the world full of interesting things. The Costa Ricans (of whom there are, as noted, a few in Port Limón) come to the train to bid farewell to the two or three who are going to San José. The negro youth who took charge of our baggage wanders serenely in, an hour after all his work is done, to collect his fees, after which he sits down in the seat behind us, rolls himself out luxuriously and engages us in cordial persiflage until the train departs.

At last it does depart, on one of the various standard times that operate in Port Limón (Canal Zone time, Fruit Company time, Railroad time, San José time, etc.). It takes its way out along the edge of the sea, a beach lined with cocoanuts and banana trees, as we see it on our right, and on our left, a murmuring, beautiful, tropical river, running parallel to the ocean, and edging the banana and cocoanut groves. Then forests and banana lands and negroes; negroes individually, in gangs, in huts on stilts, in villages on stilts,--everywhere. And not one Costa Rican of any shade or color.

The black belt and the banana belt climb together, first across the low coastal plain, the bananas broken by cocoanut groves now and then, later by cacao plantations, with the brown chocolate beans drying in frames in front of the huts amid the flowers the negroes have planted there. Next the banana groves are broken with broader fields of beans and potatoes and maize patches on the hillsides, and last, far in the hills, by the first coffee plantations. But the black belt never breaks; not once, all the long day's ride, till we reach Cartago, the ancient capital, an hour out of San José, in the highlands. And there, at Cartago, the black belt does end, suddenly and finally.

The ride is beautiful, radiant in every conceivable way, in the wealth of tropical forest, first, then in views of the river tumbling over its rocks just below the railway grade, again in the vistas of this same river in a deeper valley and at last in higher hills, with longer distances and slightly more rugged valleys.

Costa Rica Red Earth

Westward from Panamá our steamer ploughs the Caribbean toward the rainbow countries. The white completeness of the Canal Zone fades behind, and with it the lonely, unaccented coast of the Panamá Republic. The Mosquito Gulf lifts us on its dark blue bosom with the uncertain, always threatening swell of the waters of the "Spanish Main." For we sail this sea, flecked with romance and mystery, toward regions that are still as wonderful and new as when Drake first came to try the prowess of his tiny ships against the might of sea and Spain.

This romance and mystery we shall not lose. With the morning we touch its outer rim, the purpled edge of the rainbow's crimson--in the solid, good red earth of Costa Rica. Dawn finds us at Port Limón, and about us a long, even coast, accented now with level forests that look like overgrown maize fields or a vast nursery of that aristocrat of the garden, the canna. And so it is the canna--a noble relative of the canna family-the banana of Costa Rica. Down to the very water's edge the groves seem to come, and only a suggestion of palm and tropical forest rises above and behind them.

Now, wherever there are bananas, somewhere in the hot quiet about them is civilization--in Central America. Port Limón is an excellent type of civilization, for it is a well-built port, and looks not at all forbidding as a town, merely a not too much modernized blotch of human-ness in the green of the jungle and banana groves. It welcomes us with its busy and efficient pier and after the Costa Rican doctor has come aboard our ship draws up alongside--a noble miracle of seamanship without a tug and with a single-screw steamer!

Port Limón is a banana port when all is said and done. The real Costa Rica is only sifting in on us, all the beautiful, vivid, proud Costa Rica that lies beyond the jungle, and beyond the hills, far up in the mountains.

Port Limón and the banana country are only the very formal and rather distantly related introduction to Costa Rica itself. The country the Spaniards knew is on the tableland, 3,000 feet above the sea. In fact, all of Costa Rica (save the two ports, one on the Caribbean and one on the Pacific) is concentrated in four little cities on the top of the Andean plateau. One can see the four of them from the slope of almost any Costa Rican mountain.

For all its diminutive size, however, Costa Rica is not one of the countries which the world can take lightly. It has only 23,000 square miles, or about the area of the American State of West Virginia, but it is one of the five American countries that have transcontinental railways within their own borders, it produces a goodly portion of the bananas we eat and some of much esteemed coffee. Costa Rica has a few mines, chiefly in one section, which have exported of gold and silver. But coffee and bananas and, increasingly, sugar and cacao are its chief products.

Glaring miracle of Panamá

Panamá is not included in Central America, either geographically, politically or commercially. It was formerly a part of the South American Republic of Colombia. Its commercial problems are now those of the canal, and even geographically Panamá marks the end, rather than a part of the Central American division. Yet because Panamá is the convenient cross-roads that it is, and because, too, of the presence of the canal, it is wisest to begin our journey from Panamá. The great canal should be seen, if for the fiftieth time, on the verge of any trip into tropical America, for in that vast work we have visible proof that man can conquer, as he has conquered there, his eternal enemy, the jungle. It is well to carry that picture as we start for lands where that age-long battle of the tropics seems often just begun.

Panamá, at whichever end of the canal, is comfortable, soothing and amusing. From its great concrete docks we can take boat with ease and the assurance that Costa Rica is only overnight away, and so go to rest in comfort and anticipation. The start is best made from Cristobal (or Colón--they are the same) at the northern, or Caribbean, end of the canal, the destination Port Limón, Costa Rica, where we take train for the journey across Costa Rica, via its capital, to the Pacific. On the Pacific, at Puntarenas, we shall start on our journey up the coast to the other four countries, which are still as a group, reached best from the Pacific side.

But let us go aboard, to linger a moment to look out again over the glaring miracle of Panamá, and then to turn our backs and look out, beyond, at the sea, keeneyed and eager for the color and the fresh promised charm of the rainbow countries.

The Spanish influence on Central American history

The Spanish influence on Central American history is none the less overwhelming. Central America is no younger child of Spain. No less a personage than Christopher Columbus himself discovered Honduras in 1502, sailed south along the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua (where he was not impressed by any friendliness in the Indians), and reached, finally, to the land that he called Costa Rica (literally "Rich Shore"). There, for the first time on this voyage, the Spaniards found gold--in the ornaments worn by the natives. Those beautifully wrought ornaments of Costa Rica are rare archeological treasures today, and, as Columbus himself later learned, they were treasures to the Indians then, for gold was no common metal there. But the sign was enough for the Spaniards, and the short-lived settlement of Costa Rica, headed by Bartholomew Columbus, was one of the first on the mainland of the continent.

But in that very time there was passing away in the north, in what is now Guatemala, one of the greatest barbaric civilizations which history has ever seen, that of the Mayas, a wealth and a civilization of which the Spaniards were as yet entirely ignorant. Superb cities, built of stone elaborately wrought, with a literature even today only partially deciphered, a science in many ways more accurate and advanced than that of, the Europe of that time, and a social organization which the governments that have followed under Spain and the independence have hardly excelled,--these were the characteristics of the great history which preceded the Spaniards.

The conquest of these Central American Indians by the Spaniards came nearly two decades later. Although little known, in comparison with the conquests of México and Perú as immortalized by Prescott's vivid narratives, it lacks none of the heroism, or the cruelty, or the bigotry, of those larger canvases. The march of Pedro de Alvarado's army, overland from México into Guatemala through jungles that are utterly trackless to this day, is another of the striking stories of superhuman endurance that mark the whole history of Spain in America.
The battles whose scenes we shall visit in the highlands of Guatemala have a legendary glory awful in its horror and superb in its daring, while the hazy tales of ruthless and easy conquest of tribes other than the Mayas and their highland allies, are virtually hidden in the as yet unscratched archæology of these countries, yet for that matter, neither the one nor the other seems less lost in dim tradition than are the events of the Spanish rule that followed in succeeding centuries.

Indeed, the background of the Central America of today sometimes seems like a dim romantic panorama, of prehistoric civilizations, rivalling Egypt and India, of Spanish conquerors running rivers red with the blood of Indian armies, of pirates treading the "Main" with dripping swords and leathern sacks of yellow gold, and, in more modern days, of chivalrous revolutions and burning idealisms, of slavery and the wealth of coffee, of colorful dictatorships and the golden trove of the banana trade. It is all part and parcel of a past of isolation in the very midst of the world. For three centuries Spain held the world at bay, and then for an even hundred years revolutions, politics and diplomacy have shut Central America away not only from Europe and Asia but from the United States as well..