About Costa Rica

The Country of Costa Rica

Tourist destination
Walk into any travel agent in England and they will have information on Costa Rica as a popular tourist destination.

It is over fifty years since the armed forces were abolished. During that time, while neighbouring Central American countries have been torn apart by bloody civil wars, Costa Rica has earned a deserved reputation as a peaceful democracy. For such a small country it has a wide variety of natural beauty, including beaches, jungle, cloud forests and active volcanoes. These make it a paradise for adventure holidays such as white water rafting.

The corresponding variety of flora and fauna includes more species of birds than have been identified in the whole of the United States and Canada combined. Snakes, monkeys, crocodiles, jaguars, dolphins, tarantulas, parrots, armadillos, tapirs, humming birds and turtles all help to make Costa Rica one of the world’s most important centres of eco-tourism.

Poverty and refugees
Costa Rica is a beautiful country. But there is still poverty and many families in the shanty towns literally struggle to survive. Educación Plus works with poor children and their families in the three shanty town areas around the west and south of San José, the capital. A lot of the families we work with are, in fact, Nicaraguan. During the Nicaraguan civil war of the 1980’s, many poor refugees fled to their southern neighbour and shanty towns suddenly sprang up, mainly around the capital. These folk settled and later called their extended families to join them. Despite that war ending in 1989, there is still quite a flow of economic refugees from Nicaragua into Costa Rica.

Many of these refugees are in the country illegally. Although the Costa Rican government is fairly lenient towards them, they lack the will or resources to put their papers in order and do not show up on official censuses or statistics. As a result of this and other factors, many of the officially published figures, such as for average income, life expectancy or literacy rates, are not applicable in the shanty towns, where the situation is invariably considerably worse than in the rest of the country..