Chapter XXII: Costa Rica—the “rich Coast”

If we travel by the shortest and most comfortable route from Nicaragua to Costa Rica—the “Rich Coast”—we shall take a steamer on the Pacific from Corinto to Puntarenas (“Sandy Point”) where we can get a train for the capital. Or we can take a boat at Granada and sail down Lake Nicaragua to the border of Costa Rica. Let us, however, go down the Atlantic coast—called the Mosquito Coast from the Misskitos or Mosquitos, a race of mixed African and Indian blood.

Weather-blackened old San Juan del Norte, otherwise known as Greytown, will be the Caribbean terminus of the Nicaraguan Canal, if it is ever built. It is a typical east-coast town, low, swampy, ill smelling, with black inhabitants in the majority. In the days of the gold rush to California it was a thriving city. Then this coast, from Yucatan to Costa Rica, was a part of the British Mosquito Kingdom, of which only British Honduras (Belize) now remains. To-day the whole population of Greytown rush to their doors to stare at any new white man who lands there.

We take a boat from Greytown to Port Limón, the principal port of what many people consider the most charming land in America. Limón harbor is bounded by a white crescent beach fringed with graceful coconut palms. Several million bunches of bananas a year are shipped from Limón to the United States and Europe. The Caribbean shore is noted also for its turtles, which furnish us soup and tortoise shell. On the Pacific coast pink pearls and mother-of-pearl are obtained.

United Fruit Company

Coffee picking on a plantation not far from San José.
]

Limón is the eastern terminus of the short transcontinental railway which passes through the capital, San José. One of the three railroads in Spanish-America most famous for scenic beauty, it carries us inland through an ever-changing panorama of banana plantations, cane fields, thatched villages, dense jungles and forests. We pass magnificent trees, festooned with moss and vines, as we make our way through rugged gulches and beside foaming rivers. In the distance lofty mountains tower toward flimsy white clouds that float in the bluest of skies. From Port Limón to San José the railway is owned by an English corporation but it is leased by the Northern Railway Company, a subsidiary of the United Fruit Company. From San José to the Pacific coast the railway is owned and operated by the Costa Rican Government.

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

A cart full of coffee beans delivering its load.
]

Into the Highlands Once More

The train climbs mountain sides until the stream it has been following becomes a mere ribbon far below. It crawls along winding cliffs that look out upon endless vistas of waving palm-tree tops. Soon we are up in the exhilarating coolness of the highlands, among rolling hills. The banana lands and the uncomfortably hot weather have been left behind at the foothills. Up to an altitude of three of four thousand feet, we pass many coffee plantations, the red berries glistening in the morning dew. The bushes climb hills so steep that the planters and pickers would seem to need ladders. Costa Rica coffee, which is considered excellent, is sold mostly in the European countries. To the Costa Ricans it is one of their most important products.

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

One of the processes in preparing coffee for the market consists in
washing it.
]

Other products of this rich land are tobacco, sugar, cacao, rubber, vanilla, and hides; but all these are of small account compared to bananas and coffee. Costa Rica has minerals, too, but its agricultural products are more important. Columbus rightly named the region “Rich Coast.” Yet fertile as it is, and despite its name, it was very poor until it had been opened up by foreign capital.

Costa Rica, with its 23,000 square miles, is about half as large as Pennsylvania. Except Salvador, it is the smallest republic in the Americas. Everywhere but on the east coast it is very mountainous, with many volcanoes. Not only is the scenery beautiful; the climate is splendid at all but the lowest levels. Most of the country is so healthful that Canal Zone doctors recommend it to convalescents, and many American employees go to Costa Rica for their yearly vacations instead of returning to the United States.

The railroad reaches a height of almost five thousand feet at the top of the pass some ninety miles from the Atlantic. The mountains seem to roll over one another in all sorts of shapes, like a school yard full of boys playing rough and tumble. Here are great gorges, there hollows or plots of almost level land covered with small farms. Some of the peaks are two miles high, and from the top of one of them both oceans can be seen.

Panama Mail Steamship Co., San Francisco

Both coffee and rosewood are shipped from Puntarenas, Costa Rica.
]

From the summit, the train descends two thousand feet toward the capital. On the way we stop at Cartago, the old capital and seat of Spanish rule, picturesque with its red-tiled roofs. It was named for Carthage, famous city of antiquity. When independence was declared, some of the people of Cartago refused to join the revolutionists, and the latter made San José their capital. Many wealthy Costa Ricans still prefer to live in Cartago. It lies on the slope of the volcano Irazú, which has a number of worn-out craters. Mt. Poas makes more trouble for the region. In April, 1910, an earthquake was felt throughout the plateau, and in Cartago one thousand people, one-tenth of the population, perished in the ruins of their city. To-day there are still signs of this disaster, but most of the wrecked area has been rebuilt. The visitor who wanders about Cartago on a summer evening (the only kind of evening the city has) and sees the gay crowds at the outdoor band concert or coming from the movies or the theater, finds it hard to realize that it has been the scene of a great tragedy.

United Fruit Company

The National Theater at San José, Costa Rica, is a very costly and
handsome building.
]

The Delightful Costa Rican Capital

The train goes on down into a fertile valley dotted with little farms and puffs into San José, the most delightful capital in Central America and one of the most interesting small cities anywhere below the Rio Grande. It lies in a natural amphitheater of mountains that are always green, their heads often lost in clouds. It is a city of quaint Spanish architecture, yet with every modern comfort, a city of the loveliest climate, a quiet, peaceful city slumbering beneath a warm sun that never burns, with the most attractive _plazas_. and, some people think, the most beautiful women in the world.

The most delightful thing about San José is that, though it is so up-to-date in some ways, it remains as picturesquely charming as a city of old Spain. Nearly every woman one meets wears a very large shawl. Even among the lower classes this wrap is often richly embroidered, though the wearer may be barefoot. It is often of silk, in brilliant colors, with a fringe a foot long. The one- or two-story houses squat contentedly about the big cathedral, like chicks about a hen. Oxen plod slowly through the narrow Moorish streets behind the driver’s goad—for the Spanish way is to walk ahead and coax the animals to follow by goading them in the neck. Their noses almost touch the ground, their massive shoulders swing from side to side in unison, because of the yoke bound to their horns. In the coffee fields just outside the capital, the peons laugh and chat as they fill their baskets with the red berries that will some day cheer the café customers of Paris and Berlin.

A Progressive Land

Columbus discovered the “Rich Coast” in 1493, and by the time of his fourth voyage, in 1502, it seems already to have been settled. Fortune favored it from the beginning. As it had few gold mines, it did not attract to its shores those swashbuckling adventurers whose descendants still keep so many of the neighboring countries in turmoil. It was not settled by _conquistadores_ from hot-blooded Andalusia, bent on enslaving the Indians and doing no work themselves, but by people from Galicia in the northwestern corner of Spain. Although other Spaniards consider the Gallegos (people of Galicia) rather stupid, they are the hardest-working farmers in Spain. Those who came to America did not intermarry with the Indians of Costa Rica but took the country away from the native tribes. To-day, once we have passed the black fringe along the Caribbean coast, we find few Indians and not many half-breeds, but a race that is eighty per cent pure Spanish, even among the lowly peons.

It is no wonder that the people of Costa Rica seem happier than most Central Americans. Their country is not only fertile and charming, but usually it is one of the most peaceful of the Latin-American lands. The two smallest republics on the American continents, Salvador and Costa Rica, are among the most progressive.

The Costa Ricans are paying off their national debt. They have enough primary and grammar schools for all the children, and colleges in the chief cities. The law requires all children to go to school. Not being troubled by constant civil wars, Costa Rica has had time to progress. The land is fairly divided; most of the people own their own farms and are contented. Nearly every countryman has his own little estate, with a patch of bananas, a fruit garden, and a place to grow vegetables.

Costa Rica refused to join the other countries of Central America in a federation, because it knew that it could get on better alone than by combining with its quarrelsome neighbors. True, in 1872 it had its ninth constitution which, for the next ten years, was almost suspended by a dictator of the Diaz type; and since then the constitution has often been changed. But on the whole it has had a peaceful history. Its president and members of Congress are elected for four years. It has a small standing army of five hundred soldiers in time of peace, but as all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty are in the militia, it can quickly call upon 50,000 reserves if war breaks out.

Costa Rica has a population of about 500,000, of whom only 3,500 are Indians. Most of its people live on the central plateau, in an area of about 3,500 square miles, so that nearly five-sixths of its territory is still covered with forest and jungle. The four principal cities are in the one mountain district, and are so close together that they are connected by a wagon road barely thirty miles long. Most of its roads and forms of transportation are still quite primitive. Away from the railroad nearly all travel is on horseback, or in oxcarts. The small horses are almost all singlefoot—that is, their gait is an amble—which makes them easy to ride. Nearly every traveler carries saddlebags across his shoulders, instead of a suitcase in his hand, and horses are seen at almost every station.

Although San José is a city of only about 40,000 inhabitants it boasts a two-million-dollar national theater which is as richly decorated as any in the United States. This theater was badly damaged by an earthquake in March, 1924, but it has been almost entirely rebuilt. It really benefits only the rich and the well-to-do, since most of the people cannot afford to attend it. Often it is closed for a whole year. Yet everyone is required to help pay for it, because it is maintained by the government.

Canal Zone. Photo by E. Hallen, Official Photographer

The city of Panama from Ancon Hill, looking out across the Pacific’s
broad expanse.
]