There’s a lot that the first-time Trini visitor to Costa Rica will find familiar. The shape of the Central American country roughly matches that of Tobago, if you flopped that island laterally and increased its size by a factor of 170.
It is bounded by the Caribbean Sea on its eastern coast, the Pacific Ocean on its western coast, Nicaragua to its north and Panama to its south.
This huge land mass is home to a range of businesses, with tourism long outstripping the country’s banana crops, which thrived under the exploitative oversight of the United Fruit company.
Banana exports are now ranked alongside integrated circuit production and medical appliance manufacture as key export products.
The dominance of the tourism product is the result of both a range of natural attractions, which the government has wisely protected, if not overtly developed with much enthusiasm. The work of making something out the range of natural assets has been left to individuals and small companies, who bring an agreeable enthusiasm to the work of pleasing curious tourists despite a notable lack of resources.
Detail of a completed oxcart, built painted and offered for sale at the Joaquin Chaverri Oxcart Factory. Photo by Mark Lyndersay.
One such project is the work of Federico Gutiérrez, or to be exact, his entire family, led by his father and brothers, resulting in the Nochebuena Volcano Museum, an educational centre just a few metres uphill from the family’s restaurant, which is itself just five kilometres downhill from the volcano site.
It’s a useful stop to get some refreshment, acclimatise to the air, which, at almost 3,500 km above sea level, is both chilly and thin, and get some context for the three massive calderas that constitute the Irazú volcanic site.
It’s at the museum that you discover the scale of the calderas that constitute the site, representing eruptions separated by centuries. The most recent of these major eruptions started in 1963, spewing rock and ash-laden steam across vast swaths of the Cartago and San Jose provinces across four years.
That caldera, a huge, still angry-looking gouge in the earth is quite different from the earliest indicator of eruption, now just a concave depression full of black volcanic dust which hosts some particularly hardy and hard-done-by tufts of brown, struggling grasses.
Eleven sites of geological activity have been recorded at the site, and new geothermal activity at Los Fumaroles was recorded in 1994. That’s actually the part you visit, since the more recent calderas are still intimidating, jagged remainders of violent eruption.
But that four-year experience, with the fine black volcanic dust that resulted, also offered a long-term payoff for Costa Rican agriculture, making the mountains around Irazú fertile and welcoming for a range of crops.
Still, the Irazú site is a chilling reminder that Costa Rica’s mountain ranges, which include other volcano sites, are part of the Asian-Pacific Ring of Fire arc of geological instability.
Contrast that experience with a visit to the Llanos De Cortez Waterfall, nestled in a hollow of otherwise arid grazing land in the Guanacaste Province.
The wending trail to the site is as interesting as the crashing falls themselves, offering views of handsome forest owls and other wildlife among its dense leafy branches, and the occasional helping presence of nimble locals, who flit through the forest beyond the trail with authority.
The waterfall is a popular spot for Costa Ricans, who picnic there during holidays. A lifeguard’s whistle will occasionally be heard, warning swimmers who drift too close to the river waters as they thunder into the pool.
With two oceans to choose from, the Pacific eastern coasts have proven the more popular, meeting the criteria for visitors seeking sun, sea and sand.
Dominical beach, a vast stretch of coastline peppered with semi-permanent structures and full-on concrete businesses, is essentially Manzanilla, a beachfront with aggressive waves for surfers.
Manuel Antonio beach is more like Las Cuevas, open to the wider ocean and with warnings of potential riptides, but accessible to the timid bather, a bit like Maracas on a calm day.
At both beaches, the sand, which glints in sunlight, is a reminder of the powdered volcanic rock that fell all over the country after Irazú became active in 1963.
Costa Ricans are predominantly Roman Catholic, and a visit to the country over the Easter weekend finds even the active city centre almost abandoned.
The BasÍlica de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, an imposing grey-and-white house of worship in Cartago Province, reopened after restoration in 1939, and commands a view of a large park.
Smaller but no less intriguing is the Iglesia de la Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes church in Grecia. The small town in the Alajuela province isn’t the most exciting place to visit, but on Good Friday morning, the congregation of the metal church observes Viernes Santo with a very solemn parade along the C. Central road, beginning in front of the Simon Bolivar School and proceeding north to honour the Way of the Cross.
Fourteen stations are recreated along the road and adherents stop to worship, led by their religious leader at each of the hand-crafted biblical stops that contemplate Christ’s walk to crucifixion.
The procession ends at the church proper, built of metal sheets prefabricated in Belgium and transported overland by oxen, beginning in 1893. This dramatic decision followed the destruction of the previous wooden church in an earthquake.
The Costa Rican tradition of lavishly decorated wooden oxcarts remains a source of national pride, with carts mainly produced in the artisan town of Sarchi occupying pride of place in businesses.
The visitor will also be intrigued by the presence of lavish graffiti murals in the city centre of San Jose which suggest an undiminished enthusiasm for decoration with purpose (the carts were originally decorated to distinguish them apart).
Some of these murals are official, advertising the capacity of the city’s technical university, for instance; some are clearly artistic expression; but others are political, with sanctioned messages from the city’s political leaders often being overwritten by dissenting messages, the divergent positions playing out in flourishes of spray paint across stretches of walls.