Costa Rica
country in Central America
Costa Rica, officially the Republic of Costa Rica, is a country in Central America. It borders Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, sharing a maritime border with Ecuador to the south of Cocos Island. It has a population of around five million in a land area of nearly 51,180 km2 (19,760 sq mi); the capital and largest city is San José, home to around 350,000 residents and two million people in the surrounding metropolitan area.
Humans have been in Costa Rica since between 7,000 and 10,000 BC. Various indigenous peoples lived in the territory before it was colonized by Spain in the 16th century. Costa Rica was a peripheral colony of the Spanish Empire until independence in 1821 as part of the First Mexican Empire, followed by membership in the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823, from which it formally declared independence in 1847. The country underwent gradual modernization under relatively stable authoritarian rule until the late 19th century, when it promulgated a liberal constitution and held the first free and fair national election in Central America.
Following a brief civil war in 1948, Costa Rica adopted its current constitution in 1949, which granted universal suffrage, provided various social, economic, and educational guarantees for all citizens, and permanently abolished the army, becoming one of the few sovereign nations without a standing military. Costa Rica is a presidential republic with a robust and stable democracy. About one-fourth of the national budget is spent on education—which has been free and compulsory since 1886—equal to about 6.2% of the country's GDP, compared to a global average of 3.8%; the economy, once heavily dependent on agriculture, has diversified to include finance, corporate services for foreign companies, pharmaceuticals, and ecotourism.
Costa Rica has consistently performed favorably in the Human Development Index (HDI), placing 62nd globally, and fifth in Latin America, in 2023.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Costa Rica” as country in Central America. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q800. VIAF identifies the subject as 126073638. The Library of Congress control number is n79070075. Authority coordinates are 10.000, -84.000. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1821, 1823, 1847 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Costa Rica” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.