Costa Rica

Costa Rica is a country in Central America bordered by Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, with a maritime boundary toward Ecuador near Cocos Island, and covers nearly 51,180 square kilometers. San Jose, with about 350,000 residents and roughly 2 million in its metropolitan area, is the capital and largest city of a country whose total population is around 5 million. Indigenous peoples inhabited the region for thousands of years before Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century; Costa Rica gained independence in 1821 and formally separated from the Federal Republic of Central America in 1847, and after a brief civil war in 1948 adopted its current constitution in 1949, which abolished the military, making Costa Rica one of the few sovereign nations without a standing military, and granted universal suffrage and broad social guarantees. The country is a unitary presidential republic, led as of 2026 by President Laura Fernandez Delgado and two vice presidents, and the World Bank reclassified Costa Rica as a high-income economy in 2025; it is the only member of the OECD in Central America and the Caribbean, ranking 62nd in the world and fifth in Latin America on the Human Development Index, with particular strength in democratic governance, press freedom and environmental leadership.