Costa Rica
Cahuita Hotel 952
The only hotel on the beach in Cahuita.
Mystery shrouds pre-Columbian Costa Rica: few archaeological monuments and no proof of a written language have ever been discovered. Recorded history tends to begin with Christopher Columbus, who stayed for 17 days in 1502, and was so impressed by the gold decorations worn by the friendly locals he promptly dubbed the country Costa Rica, 'the rich coast'. Despite the lure of untold wealth, colonisation was slow to take hold and it took nearly 60 years for the Spanish settlers to make a dent in the tangled jungle. Once the process had started, however, Costa Rica, like its similarly colonised neighbours, suffered the effects of European invasion. The indigenous population did not have the necessary numbers to resist the Spanish, and their populations dwindled quickly because of susceptibility to European diseases.
The hoped-for hoards of gold never materialised and Costa Rica remained a
forgotten backwater for many years. The 18th century saw the establishment of
settlements such as Heredia, San José and Alajuela but it was not until the
introduction of coffee in 1808 that the country registered on the radars of the
19th-century white-shoe brigade and frontier entrepreneurs looking to make a
killing. Coffee brought wealth, a class structure, a more outward-looking
perspective, and most importantly independence.