The Spanish Names of Costa Rica: Saints, Sands, and Stories
In Costa Rica, the mapa (map) is also a chronicle of colonial memory. If Indigenous names whisper the first voices of the land, Spanish names reveal how the colonizers bent geography to their saints, their towns back in Andalucía, their eyes for arenales (sand fields), and their hopes for a new San José (Saint Joseph).
San José
The capital’s name is as Spanish as it gets. San José was founded in the 18th century when settlers gathered around a small hermitage dedicated to Saint Joseph, husband of Mary. Unlike the older towns of Cartago and Heredia, San José didn’t grow out of a colonial order but from farming families who sought water and good soil. Naming the place for San José was a way to give spiritual cover to what was, in truth, an agricultural gamble (Meléndez, 1982).
Cartago
One of the earliest Spanish settlements, Cartago, was named after the ancient city of Carthage in North Africa—an echo of Spanish imperial imagination. To the Spaniards, invoking the memory of Rome’s rival empire gave their fragile foothold in Central America a sense of grandeur (Fonseca, 2002).
Heredia
Heredia took its name from Diego de Heredia, a Spanish official whose name marked power, property, and permanence. What today feels like a quaint colonial city of coffee and casas antiguas (old houses) was, in name, a reminder of European landholding structures.
Alajuela
The name Alajuela comes from alajón, an old Castilian word meaning a small paved stone or cobbled surface. In the plural diminutive, it became “alajuelas”—the little stones. Over time, it was fixed as Alajuela. In naming their towns, Spaniards often drew on everyday images from Iberian landscapes (Chacón, 1995).
Guanacaste
Though best known as a province with deep Indigenous roots, the name Guanacaste is Spanish shorthand for kuanáhkatl (Nahuatl for “tree of ears”). Spaniards hispanicized the sound into something their tongues could manage. Over time, the mighty árbol de Guanacaste (guanacaste tree) became both a landmark and a province name.
Puntarenas
Meaning literally sandy point, Puntarenas reveals the navigators’ view of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Spanish sailors saw a long sandy spit reaching into the gulf and named it not for saints but for geography. Even today, Puntarenas carries the straightforward, sailor’s logic of colonial maps (Molina, 2016).
Limón
The province of Limón is among the simplest of Spanish names—limón (lemon). Early Spaniards often planted citrus near ports, both as food and as medicine against scurvy. Whether the name refers to an actual lemon grove or simply the familiarity of citrus, Limón shows how colonial naming could be blunt, useful, and agricultural.
Uvita
The town of Uvita, now a tourist hub on the southern Pacific, carries a diminutive: uvita (little grape). Spaniards brought vines, olives, and wheat to the Americas, and when they found plants or fruits that resembled their own, they baptized them accordingly. Even if no grapes grew here, the shape of fruit or memory of home could spark a name.
Arenales
Arenales (sandy areas) is another practical name. Spaniards often labeled land for its soil, its sand, or its rivers. An arenal was simply a place of sand. Thus, Arenal, now synonymous with the volcano, began as a description, not a monument.
Tourist Names Today
Spanish place names also mark Costa Rica’s global tourist map: Playa Hermosa (Beautiful Beach), Playa Conchal (Shell Beach), Playa Flamingo (Flamingo Beach). These are legible to visitors in a way Indigenous names are not—direct, easy, picturesque. In that sense, the colonial logic of renaming continues into the tourism economy.
References
Chacón, C. (1995). Historia de Alajuela. Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica.
Fonseca, E. (2002). Cartago: ciudad e historia. Editorial de la Universidad Estatal a Distancia.
Meléndez, C. (1982). San José: orígenes históricos de la capital de Costa Rica. Editorial Costa Rica.
Molina, I. (2016). Costa Rica en el siglo XIX: sociedad y cultura. Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica.