Maria José Soto has been crowned Costa Rica’s spelling champion today, beating 22 other finalists. She’ll travel to Mexico to represent Costa Rica in the Concurso Hispanoaméricano de Ortografía in December. Maria told La Nacion, “I’m so excited! I never imagined that all I love to read would lead to something so wonderful and allow me to [...]

For the fifth consecutive year, Tulemar Beach has received the prestigious Blue Flag award for water quality and other ecological criteria from the National Blue Flag Commission. Located in Costa Rica’s central pacific coastal town of Manuel Antonio, the beach provides a unique experience for residents and visitors of the residential resort community of Tulemar. [...]

September 15th is Independence Day in Costa Rica, and the whole country celebrates this important event with parades of bands, lanterns (faroles), the song, “Diana” (Independece Hymn), a torch relay race and other activities. Costa Rica gained its independence from Spain on September 15th, 1821. Before it became independent, Costa Rica was Spanish territory, and [...]

Today is “Día del Niño” in Costa Rica. On November the 20th of 1954, the General Assembly of the United Nations agreed that all countries in the world should hold a day to reaffirm the universal rights of minors. They concluded that every country should specify a date that each one believed most convenient. For [...]

Mother’s Day is a national holiday in Costa Rica. Banks, schools, government offices, and many private business are closed and everyone honors their mother (or her memory) in the style that most befits their budget. Some families give Mom the day off from her normal love-fueled family management tasks and prepare a special meal for [...]

Leisure time is precious to us all. There’s so much we’d like to do and seemingly very little time to do it all. Every gadget and new digital “assistant” has to serve multiple functions to allow us to be the multi-tasking machines we need to be these days. Even our leisure time itself has to [...]

July 25th marks the anniversary of the annexation of Guanacaste by Costa Rica in 1824, and in addition to being a national holiday, it’s a celebration of peace and democracy. The people of Guanacaste held a referendum in 1824 and voted to leave Nicaragua and become part of Costa Rica, whom they believed they had [...]