If you’ve read the previous cruise diary entry in this travel portfolio then you’ll know that we had already boarded the tour bus at the pier at Puntarenas and had a brief stop to feed White-faced Capuchins at the roadside. A fairly lengthy drive from the port city to the nation’s capital then followed with ample information about Costa Rica’s economy, geography, and history supplied by our guide. In the video below (temporarily removed) you can catch part of that drive and some of the landscape compressed into a couple of minutes, and near the start you’ll be able to see some of the wildfires in the hillsides that were a constant sight both going to and coming from San José.

The National Theatre Of Costa Rica

First stop of the day on this excursion was just outside Plaza De La Cultura for a visit to Costa Rica’s National Theatre.

After a little bit of chaos caused by our bus not having enough tickets to get in but the other bus having more tickets than it needed thus requiring us to wait until everyone had arrived so tickets could be allocated properly (which they still weren’t so I was the sole person without a ticket but was waved through anyway) we made our way out of the heat of the day and into the considerably cooler and darker building’s interior. We gathered in the main theatre space while half the excursion passengers headed off to use the toilets (naturally) and this gave me a chance to take some photos, although the low light of this part of the theatre didn’t make this an easy task.

Once everyone was ready we were seated in the front rows of the theatre and were informed about some of its history and features. José Joaquín Rodríguez Zeledón was, in addition to being an almost unbeatable score in Scrabble, the fifteenth president of Costa Rica, holding that position from 1890 to 1894. It wasn’t the most peaceful of presidencies with congress being dissolved at one point and many of his methods of controlling the populace not exactly meeting with their approval. In 1891 he did, however, initiate the building of the National Theatre in San José (partially financed through coffee taxation) although its construction was beset with problems. Zeledón was succeeded by Rafael Yglesias Castro who was so impressed with technological progress happening in Europe during official visits to France and the United Kingdom that he brought in an Italian engineer to address the problems with the theatre’s construction and complete it. This was duly done and in 1897 the National Theatre of Costa Rica was opened, its first production being Faust with Castro in attendance.

Moving on from the history we were given some explanations of the design of the theatre which borrowed a lot of influences inside and out from Europe, the cultural home of theatre at the time, including large amounts of Italian marble. The National Theatre was also one of the first buildings in Central America to have electric lighting. The thing we most liked was that the floor could be raised mechanically so that it was level with the stage, giving the theatre the ability to host a larger area for non-theatrical events too.

We headed upstairs next, amassing on the stairs in order to be shown some of the architectural styles and artworks on show there. Of particular significance was the 1897 mural Allegory Of Coffee And Bananas by the Italian artist Aleardo Villa. Villa never visited Costa Rica and so there are a couple of issues with it, namely that coffee grows in the mountains, not by the sea, and the bananas are being held upside down. Nevertheless, the mural is well-loved by the Costa Rican people.

Upstairs was the foyer, a large, open, light, impressive room with plenty of features to look at and admire. It was possible to walk around the outside of the room but not cross the centre which was a shame as the most interesting feature of the room for us was the painting on the ceiling. The photos can’t do it justice because the angles are impossible to correct for but in the paintings there are cherubs and angels who appear to be looking one way when viewed from one side of the room and another way when viewed from the other side; eyes that don’t follow you around the room.

We finished our visit to Costa Rica’s National Theatre with a quick look from the balcony seats before we headed back out into the sunshine.

Outside the theatre we bought some souvenir currency. The five colón note was no longer in circulation but its design was a famous one in the country and related to our visit. The face of the note contained the portrait of Rafael Yglesias Castro while the reverse was a copy of Allegory Of Coffee And Bananas.

Pre-Columbian Gold Museum

A very short walk from the theatre was the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum. The entrance to this was behind and below the theatre with the bulk of the building continuing further beneath the ground. As befits a museum housing a lot of gold there was a fair amount of security to get through with bags scanned and checked through and metal detectors passed through too. And, of course, the museum structure, being subterranean and constructed from concrete, was further security in and of itself. As a fan of brutalist architecture the design of the museum was fabulous to my eyes (and caused a security guard to give me a quizzical look as I took a photo of the ceiling concrete) and its raw, spartan construction contrasted wonderfully with the intricate items housed in the building.

The first floor down contained the National Coin Museum. I can’t confess to being wowed by coins in general unless they’re significantly different in some way although we do collect what we can when we travel as mementoes. For a numismatist, though, there was plenty to look at and lots of information at hand. Probably of most interest to me were the coffee plantation tokens. During the explosion in coffee production in Costa Rica so much land was given over to growing coffee that more trade had to take place to provide people with what they needed. This trade exceeded the capacity of the country’s mint to provide so the government permitted foreign currency to be used and, on the plantations, private currency in the form of tokens came into being. These were constructed of various materials, marked for the plantation, and could be used in stores owned by the plantation owners as well as elsewhere if the plantation owners were trusted by the storekeepers. The idea was that labourers could be paid in tokens until such time as real currency became available when they would be able to exchange it but it did lock the workers into spending a proportion of their earnings with the owners when currency was scarce. Nice for the owners. Token usage was phased out in the 1970s.

The lowest level contained the gold museum. The museum doesn’t just house gold items, with numerous artifacts from the same range of history of Costa Rica on display alongside some modern pieces of art, some of it abstract, that really appeals to me. One of the older sculptures looked remarkably like Ludo from the film Labyrinth.

But it was the gold that was the main draw for this visit to the museum, especially for a certain someone’s wife. Pre-Columbian refers to the time before European influences swept into the countries of the Americas. The museum houses over 1600 gold artifacts from about 500 C.E. onwards in that period and showcases the artistry and skill of the gold workers with items such as necklaces, hair barrettes, coins, and figurines. Animals feature prominently amongst the gold figures although in some cases you have to try to decide whether the artist had ever seen one before or if evolution selected that particular species for a quick eradication in the wake of its memorialisation in gold.

The Pre-Columbian Gold Museum had a very small gift shop but nothing interesting or affordable for our tastes so while we waited for others to complete their tour or visit the gift shop or use the toilets we headed back outside and into the main square above the museum in order to take some photos before getting back on the bus.

Plaza De La Cultura

The Plaza de La Cultura is the public square directly overhead the Gold Museum and lies adjacent to and north of the National Theatre. This was a popular place for locals as it was around lunchtime at this point. Shops surrounded the square on three sides but it was the art sculptures in the square that I was most interested in. I always like to see art on public display and as I’ve mentioned before I’m a fan of some of the more abstract pieces, and especially those where it comes to sculptures of human figures. The pieces by the Costa Rican sculptor Jiménez Deredia stood out in the plaza (the influences from pre-Columbian cultures is evident) although I liked all the artwork that we saw there.

We ended up spending longer in the Plaza de La Cultura than we’d hoped as there were several missing people by the time our guide arrived and counted us all up. Twice he went back to the museum to check for them and twice we suggested that perhaps they’d headed off to the bus instead. Eventually, he came to the same conclusion and we all headed back to the comfort of an air-conditioned vehicle and out of the searing sunshine. Our fellow excursion passengers were there which we were glad about as it meant we could head off to lunch but it would have been nice if they’d let someone know they weren’t going to meet where everyone else was.

The last part of San José that we passed on foot as we came to our bus was a statue erected opposite the entrance to the National Theatre, dedicated to Juan Mora Fernández, Costa Rica’s first elected head of state.

Swiss Travel Lunch

After a drive through parts of San José to point out landmarks such as the national football stadium, embassies, and even the schools that our guide attended we headed to Swiss Travel’s own restaurant and events venue off Radial Colón to the west of San José. There was no escaping the fact that it was a lovely-looking place. Local handicrafts were being sold as we came in and we made sure to spend some of our Costa Rican money there on the way out as we were in need of souvenirs for family back home and we always try to find things that aren’t too mass-produced if we can.

The important thing was getting some local food and drink in us, though. We had Costa Rican coffee in Costa Rica, of course, and that was included in the excursion but we also found out we could buy local beer too and with us suffering a little from the Central American heat and humidity – not to mention being lushes – we had to get some. The really interesting part of the buffet meal came afterwards when dessert was served. This turned out to be an intensely-flavoured, ridulously sweet, thick, creamy, passionfruit whip in a rippled, hard wafer. It was gorgeous.

El Jardin Souvenir Shop

The final stop before getting back to Puntarenas was at El Jardin Souvenir Shop which was surprisingly large and surprisingly well-stocked with many things of interest. This was a great place to purchase some coffee beans to take home so we did, choosing some Dota Tarrazú beans from Café Leo Seguetto on the recommendation of our guide. The Tarrazú region is highly regarded for its slow-maturing beans on account of the volcanic soil and altitude; the Dota Estate takes advantage of the micro-climate and produces exclusive blends of red and yellow Arabica beans. You want to know how they smell? Fabulous! You want to know what the coffee is like? More fabulous!

A Canadian in our tour group was next to me as I picked out the coffee to buy. “I can get that cheaper back home,” he said, then wandered across to look at something else. I’m sure he could, but that’s not the point of being a responsible tourist visiting other countries.

With coffee and some other souvenirs purchased, our day’s cruise excursion in Costa Rica and San José in particular came to and end. In the next cruise diary post I’ll cover returning to Star Princess at Puntarenas and our departure from Costa Rica ahead of the next stop in Nicaragua.