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| Tonyi Poppins in La Cascada path, Costa Rica |
Tonyi Poppins has visited Costa Rica, the amazing and wonderful Central American country, whose national natural parks are one of the most wonderful things around the planet, and whose people are charming, pleasant and unforgettable.
Costa Rica or the Republic of Costa Rica is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Ecuador to the south of Cocos Island. It has a population of around 4.9 million, in a land area of 51,060 square kilometers; over 300,000 live in the capital and largest city, San José with a population of an estimated 333,980 in 2015.
More information: Costa Rica
Costa Rica has been known for its stable democracy in a region that has had some instability and for its highly educated workforce, most of whom speak English.
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| Tonyi Poppins in the Costa Rican jungle |
Other challenges facing the country in its attempts to improve the economy by increasing foreign investment include a poor infrastructure and a need to improve public sector efficiency.
Historians have classified the indigenous people of Costa Rica as belonging to the Intermediate Area, where the peripheries of the Mesoamerican and Andean native cultures overlapped. More recently, pre-Columbian Costa Rica has also been described as part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area.
The oldest evidence, stone tool making, of human occupation in Costa Rica is associated with the arrival of various groups of hunter-gatherers about 10,000 to 7,000 years BCE in the Turrialba Valley. The presence of Clovis culture type spearheads and arrows from South America opens the possibility that, in this area, two different cultures coexisted.
Agriculture became evident in the populations that lived in Costa Rica about 5,000 years ago. They mainly grew tubers and roots, like carrots. For the first and second millennia BCE there were already settled farming communities. These were small and scattered, although the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the main livelihood in the territory is still unknown.
More information: Lonely Planet
Accounts differ as to whether the name la costa rica, Spanish for rich coast, was first applied by Christopher Columbus, who sailed to the eastern shores of Costa Rica during his final voyage in 1502, and reported the presence of vast quantities of gold jewelry among the natives, or by the conquistador Gil González Dávila, who landed on the west coast in 1522, met with the natives, and appropriated some of their gold.
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| Tonyi Poppins in her Costa Rican hut |
Like the rest of Central America, Costa Rica never fought for independence from Spain. On September 15, 1821, after the final Spanish defeat in the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821), the authorities in Guatemala declared the independence of all of Central America. That date is still celebrated as Independence Day in Costa Rica even though, technically, under the Spanish Constitution of 1812 that had been readopted in 1820, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had become an autonomous province with its capital in León.
Historically, Costa Rica has generally enjoyed greater peace and more consistent political stability compared with many of its fellow Latin American nations.
More information: Visit Costa Rica
Since the late 19th century, however, Costa Rica has experienced two significant periods of violence until its first democratic election under the new constitution in 1953. Since then, Costa Rica has held 14 presidential elections. The country is the region's most stable.
During the 41 years that have elapsed since Costa Rica abolished its army, our fundamental freedoms have never been threatened,
nor do we know a shameful history of repression.
Óscar Arias
