Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Bordered by two volatile countries (Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the east), Costa Rica is a nation with an old democratic tradition and, in this boiling cauldron, no standing army since 1949! Although the country’s Hispanic imprint is similar to that found elsewhere on the Middle American mainland, its early independence, its good fortune to lie remote from regional strife, and its leisurely pace of settlement allowed Costa Rica the luxury of concentrating on its economic development. Perhaps most important, internal political stability has predominated over much of the nearly 200 years since its independence from Spain. Like its neighbors, Costa Rica (with a population of 5 million) is divided into environmental zones that parallel its coastlines. The most densely settled is the central highland zone . . . Whose heartland is the Valle Central (Central Valley), a fertile basin that contains Costa Rica’s main coffee-growing area and the leading population cluster focused on the cosmopolitan capital of San José."