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Country & People
the country between two seas
Costa Rica
With its neighbors Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador in the north and Panama in the south, Costa Rica forms the biological corridor between North and South America. Called the “Rich Coast” by the Spanish, Costa Rica is the third smallest country in Central America after Belize and El Salvador, but offers some superlatives in its 51060 km2 area.
Guanacaste, the province in Costa Rica’s northwest with the most national parks in the country thus has five different vegetation zones in a stretch of only 40km starting with the ecosystem of sand and rocky coasts on the Pacific Ocean, followed by a steppe landscape, tropical dry forest, the premontane rainforest up to the cloud forest on the peaks of the volcanic Cordilleras. On the Caribbean side, the forested slopes of this imposing mountain landscape then merge into a vast plain covered with rainforest, which is characterized by extensive wetlands in the northern part.
The more than 100 active and extinct volcanoes of the country have created breathtakingly beautiful landscapes along the Pacific fire belt during their formation, almost all of which are located in the numerous national parks and constitute the enormous tourist attraction of Costa Rica.
The country in its biological diversity was created by the meeting of two tectonic plates, the Cocos and the Caribbean plate, which formed the land bridge about 2.7 million years ago and allowed the exchange of flora and fauna in both directions.
Popular with vacationers and dropouts, the Nicoya Peninsula represents one of the five internationally recognized Blue Zones, places of longevity for its inhabitants, many of whom live to be over 100 years old, known as centenarios, along with Okinawa, Sardinia, Icaria in Greece and Loma Linda in California.
The Nicoya mountain range, together with the mountains around Jacó on the Central Pacific, as well as the Talamanca chain, are geologically the oldest part of the isthmus.
The Pacific Fire Belt, which stretches along the western coasts of the Americas from Alaska in the north to South America, is characterized in Costa Rica by nine notable volcanoes and also forms the watershed of the country with very differentiated fauna and flora on both sides. While the Atlantic side in the east is characterized by rainforests due to the humid trade winds constantly blowing from the northeast, precipitation is lower on the Pacific side, especially in the northwest, a region with the most sunny days per year.
In the Pacific southwest of Costa Rica, on the other hand, the trade winds rising with Atlantic moisture into the Talamanca Mountains, the highest elevation of the isthmus, which rise over 3800m, and cool rapidly, generate downdrafts down to the Pacific, which then bring the Pacific moisture in rotation mode, in turn, back to the coast, where it rains down. The special geographic conditions thus create in the southwest of the country the phenomenon of tropical rainforest, rare for western coasts of the Americas. Here two climatic worlds meet, which has led to an extremely high biodiversity, especially on the Osa Peninsula.
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San José is the capital and largest city of Costa Rica, and the capital of the province of the same name. It is in the center of the country, in the mid-west of the Central Valley, within San José Canton.
Elevation: 1,172 m
Population: 339,581 (2017)
