A 1949 constitution abolished Costa Rica’s army for good
Costa Rica, a Central American republic of about five million, meets Nicaragua, Panama, Caribbean and Pacific waters—and even a maritime line toward Ecuador near Cocos Island. After a short 1948 civil war, the 1949 constitution locked in universal suffrage, social guarantees, and permanent abolition of the military.
The country covers about 51,180 square kilometres. San José, the capital and biggest city, has roughly 350,000 residents and about two million in its wider metropolitan area. Humans arrived between 7,000 and 10,000 BC; stone tools found in the Turrialba Valley are the oldest trace, and Clovis-style spear points from South America hint that two cultures lived side by side. Farming of roots and tubers appears about 5,000 years ago, and small scattered villages were settled by the first and second millennia BCE. Scholars place the region in the Intermediate or Isthmo-Colombian Area, where Mesoamerican and Andean influences overlapped.
Spain colonised the territory in the sixteenth century but treated it as a backwater. Independence came in 1821 inside the First Mexican Empire; in 1823 Costa Rica joined the Federal Republic of Central America, leaving it formally in 1847. Fairly stable authoritarian governments modernised the country gradually until the late nineteenth century, when a liberal constitution and Central America's first free and fair national election arrived.
Education has been free and compulsory since 1886, and about a quarter of the national budget goes to it, around 6.2 percent of GDP against a world average of 3.8. Once reliant on farming, the economy now includes finance, services for foreign firms, pharmaceuticals and ecotourism. The World Bank rates it high-income, and it is the only OECD member in Central America and the Caribbean.
In 2023 the country ranked 62nd in the world and fifth in Latin America on the Human Development Index, and the UN Development Programme notes it outperforms other countries at similar income. It scores well on press freedom, democratic governance and happiness, reads and writes at rates matched by few American nations and is seen as a regional leader on human rights and the environment.
Source: Costa Rica
