The People Who Named the Rivers: A Hidden History of Costa Rica
The First Costa Ricans: A Story Older Than the Name Itself
La historia comienza donde nadie la espera.
History begins where no one expects. For Costa Rica, that place is Guanacaste — the last province to join, yet the first to host human life. Before the borders, before “Costa Rica,” people lived here — at least 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists have unearthed tools and ceremonial stones along the Tempisque River that whisper of a world before written memory, a world of movement, fire, and spirit.
Long before anyone called this country “rich,” it was already full — of stories, languages, and belief. And those stories still live, though often unheard, in the voices of Costa Rica’s eight surviving Indigenous tribes: the Bribri, Cabécar, Maleku, Ngäbe (Guaymí), Boruca, Térraba (Teribe), Huetar, and Chorotega.
Today, they represent less than 2.5% of Costa Rica’s population, around 120,000 people, yet their presence is an anchor to an identity much older than the republic itself (INEC, 2022).
Eight Names, Eight Nations
Each of these groups carries not just a language, but a worldview.
The Bribri and Cabécar—relatives in language and ancestry—live deep in the misty Talamanca mountains, a region that resisted both Spanish conquest and modern assimilation. Their homes perch above rivers whose names predate maps: Coen, Telire, Urén. The Cabécar still follow a matrilineal line; women inherit the land, a quiet counter-history to the patriarchal systems that followed conquest.
To the north, the Maleku live in Guatuso, surrounded by the green walls of rainforests and the hum of río Frío. Once numbering in the tens of thousands, fewer than 1,500 Maleku remain, fighting not only for survival but for the right to speak their language — Maleku Jaíka — which UNESCO lists as severely endangered (UNESCO, 2023).
In the Pacific south, the Boruca and Térraba are known for their fiesta de los diablitos, a ritual retelling of resistance against the Spanish. In late December, men don carved balsa wood masks, painted with the colors of the forest and the flame. The devils—the diablitos—represent the Indigenous people; the bull is the Spanish invader. The battle rages through the village, ending with the bull’s death and the community’s rebirth. Every year, the Boruca replay history — and refuse to let it end.
Further north, the Chorotega, once the powerful Mesoamerican-descended nation that occupied much of Guanacaste, now number only a few hundred speakers of Chorotega-Chorotega, a language declared extinct by linguists. But in Guaitil and San Vicente, their pottery continues the lineage — clay formed by hand and polished with a corncob, using the same designs that once adorned pre-Columbian temples.
The Huetar, who once ruled the Central Valley under King Garabito, have also lost their language but not their pride. They live in Quitirrisí and Zapatón, where elders teach young people to weave, carve, and remember. Garabito himself is a national legend — the fierce chief who defied the Spanish until his last breath. His resistance earned him the title “El Indómito,” the indomitable one.
Finally, in the south near the Panamanian border, the Ngäbe (Guaymí) move between two countries, their culture split by a line they never drew. Their language — Ngäbere — still thrives, spoken by thousands across the borderlands. But survival often comes with a price: many Ngäbe work in coffee plantations or banana fields under brutal conditions, crossing mountains for seasonal harvests.
The Languages of Memory
Costa Rica was once home to at least twenty-four Indigenous languages. Today, fewer than ten remain active — some spoken by only a handful of elders. The Bribri and Cabécar still teach their children through oral tradition, not schools, which are often far and underfunded. Language revitalization projects — like the Universidad de Costa Rica’s Programa de Revitalización de Lenguas Indígenas — are documenting grammar, songs, and myths before they vanish (UCR, 2021).
But recovery is never simple. When a language dies, so do the ways to describe the world that language shaped. The Bribri, for example, have no direct word for “possession.” Their language is built around relationship and reciprocity — everything belongs not to someone, but with someone.
The Cabécar word “Sula” can mean both “tree” and “ancestor.” When the forests were cut, it wasn’t just the environment that suffered — it was the family itself.
The Arrival of Iron and Fire
The Spanish arrived in 1502, when Christopher Columbus anchored near Puerto Limón. By 1561, conquistadors led by Juan de Cavallón and Juan Vásquez de Coronado moved inland, seeking gold and slaves. What they found instead were people who refused to be conquered. Chief Garabito of the Huetar led decades of guerrilla resistance from the mountains, while Pablo Presbere, the Bribri leader, led the last great uprising in 1709, after Spanish missionaries enslaved his people and destroyed sacred sites. Presbere was captured and executed in Cartago, but his rebellion ended colonial control in the Talamanca for good.
The cost was catastrophic. Within 50 years of Spanish arrival, an estimated 90% of Costa Rica’s Indigenous populationperished — from disease, enslavement, and violence (Meléndez, 1993). What remained was a land redefined — and renamed — by the colonizers.
Spanish settlers brought horses, cows, pigs, and wheat, reshaping the landscape. They cleared forests for cattle ranching and burned valleys for sugarcane. The Indigenous model of small-scale agroforestry — planting cacao, maize, and plantains in rotation — gave way to monoculture and export.
This was the genesis of a new people: the mestizo, from the Spanish mezcla, meaning “mix.” A term once used to categorize and control bloodlines became, over centuries, Costa Rica’s dominant identity. The criollo, originally meaning a Spaniard born in the Americas, marked another layer of colonial hierarchy — those with European ancestry but local birth, who held power in colonial society.
The Gold, the Gods, and the Skies Above
The Museo del Oro Precolombino in San José preserves a vision of the world as the Indigenous saw it: gold not as wealth, but as a bridge between earth and spirit. The Bribri and Cabécar believed in Sibú, the creator god, who built the universe in layers — a sky world for the gods, the earth for humans, and an underworld where spirits transform and return.
According to Cabécar cosmology, each level is connected by the tree of life, or námu, and at its roots live the serpents of wisdom. The shaman, or awápa, is the messenger who travels between worlds.
Among the Boruca and Térraba, spirits of the rivers and mountains govern the natural order. Hunting, farming, and even carving masks must begin with permission from these guardians. “El bosque escucha,” the elders say — “the forest listens.” To cut down a tree without a word of respect is an act of violence, not utility.
The Silent Genocide and the Long Echo
After centuries of suppression, many Indigenous peoples were pushed to the most isolated, resource-poor regions of the country. By the early 20th century, their lands were labeled “unproductive.” Governments and companies built hydroelectric dams and pineapple plantations on ancestral ground.
Even the rainforest — once their shield — became a commodity. During the 1960s–80s, deforestation in Costa Rica reached catastrophic levels, with over 75% of forest cover lost (Sánchez-Azofeifa, 2001). Yet it was the Indigenous communities who, quietly and without funding, preserved what remained — practicing sustainable planting long before it became a global mantra.
Today, many of the most biodiverse protected zones — including La Amistad International Park — overlap with Indigenous territories. The paradox is painful: the same people seen as “poor” by outsiders live in the richest ecological environments on Earth. Poverty, in official statistics, hides the wealth of living knowledge, the connection to soil, to river, to breath.
Heroes, Heirs, and the Cost of Survival
Names like Pablo Presbere, Garabito, Anabel Monge (Boruca artisan), and Doña Leonor Rivera (Cabécar healer)are not just figures of the past. They are proof of continuity. Presbere’s uprising is now commemorated every July 4th as the Día Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, a day not of mourning, but of defiance.
Modern Indigenous leaders like Margarita Rojas Briceño of the Bribri and Carmen Murillo of the Ngäbe continue to fight for education and land rights — often against multinational corporations, tourism projects, and government neglect. The 2020 murder of Bribri activist Sergio Rojas Ortiz, who defended land rights in Salitre, exposed the ongoing danger of Indigenous resistance in a country often seen as a paradise of peace.
The Appropriation Paradox
There’s another kind of danger, more subtle but equally corrosive: cultural appropriation. The colorful Boruca masks sold to tourists, the Maleku drums displayed in hotels, the “tribal” tattoos inspired by ancient symbols — all can become hollow echoes of sacred meanings.
To admire is not to understand. To imitate is not to honor.
As one Boruca artisan once told a reporter, “Nuestro arte no es decoración — es memoria.” Our art is not decoration — it’s memory.
In a world hungry for exoticism, Indigenous culture risks being consumed rather than preserved. True respect lies in listening, in recognizing that what the Bribri call “tsiru” — the soul of a thing — cannot be bought or replicated.
The Story Still Being Written
The Indigenous peoples of Costa Rica live in the most beautiful places on Earth because they made them so. Their cosmologies, their languages, their songs — all are intertwined with the rivers, forests, and mountains that outsiders now come to admire.
Their struggle is not ancient; it’s ongoing. It is the fight to remain seen, to be more than the past tense of history books.
As the Bribri say, “Sibú kuöla” — “Sibú is watching.” The creator is still here, waiting to see if humanity has learned to care for the earth as its first peoples did.
References (APA 7th Edition)
Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC). (2022). Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda 2022. San José, Costa Rica.
Meléndez, C. (1993). Historia de Costa Rica: Breve, Actualizada y Documentada. Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica.
Museo del Oro Precolombino. (2023). Exposición permanente: El Mundo Espiritual Bribri y Cabécar. Fundación Museos del Banco Central.
Sánchez-Azofeifa, G. A. (2001). Deforestation and fragmentation of Costa Rican forests: 1940–2000. Ambio, 30(7), 326–329.
Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). (2021). Programa de Revitalización de Lenguas Indígenas. San José: UCR.
UNESCO. (2023). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.