The Arrival of the Spanish
On 15th September 1502, on his fourth and final voyage to the New World, Columbus landed at the Bay of Cariari (now Limón), on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica, after a violent storm wrecked his ships. During the eighteen days that he and his crew stayed to rest and make repairs they visited several coastal villages where they were welcomed by native people dressed in impressive gold and jade jewelry, who treated them with great hospitality, such that they imagined the region to be rich in mineral wealth, whose friendly inhabitants would be easily conquered. Columbus’s journal of the time records; ‘I saw more signs of gold in the first two days than I saw in Española in four years’. 6
Columbus never returned to the country, however as stories of its apparent wealth spread, the prospect of gold and riches drew other explorers to the region, which became known as ‘Costa Rica’ or the rich coast. This name must have seemed like a cruel irony to the prospective settlers who arrived to find there was no pot of gold; encountering only difficult terrain with dense forest, sweltering, swampy lowlands and impenetrable mountains, tropical diseases, lack of food and an aggressive native population.
In 1506 King Ferdinand of Spain sent a governor, Diego de Nicuesa, to colonize the Atlantic coast. The expedition was disastrous, the governor’s ships ran aground off the coast of Panama and he and his men were forced to march north along the inhospitable coast. Tropical diseases and starvation reduced the group by more than half and hostile natives used guerilla tactics to attack the strangers and burned or uprooted their crops to deny them food.
Over the next forty years several largely unsuccessful attempts were made to conquer this coast, all thwarted by the difficult terrain and climate and fierce indigenous resistance.
Explorers arriving on the Pacific coast had marginally more success. In 1522 Gil González Dávila explored the Pacific North, trading with the natives and receiving large amounts of gold, and in 1524 Francisco Fernández de Córdoba founded the first settlement, at Villa Bruselas. However, sickness, starvation, native attacks and disputes among the Spanish themselves eventually forced both expeditions to abandon the country.
While most of Central America was conquered between 1519 and 1523, with Spanish conquistadores moving down in two waves, from Mexico down and from Panama up, Costa Rica was largely left alone until 1560.
At this point King Philip II of Spain, together with the Royal representatives of the Kingdom of Guatemala – which had jurisdiction from the Chiapas region of Mexico as far as the southern border of Costa Rica – decided it was time to explore the interior of the country and ‘Christianize’ the natives. The King promised that future colonists could divide the indigenous population among themselves through a system of encomienda, whereby native family groups were allotted to landowners and obliged to provide labor, services and agricultural and artisan goods for at least two generations; in return their masters would ‘protect and Christianize them’.
However, by 1561, when Juan de Cavallón’s expedition arrived to penetrate the Central Valley region, establishing the small settlement of Garcimuñoz (now the Rio Oro de Santa Ana area), the epidemic diseases and fighting introduced by the earlier attempts to colonize, had decimated the indigenous population, reducing numbers to around 120,000 people. This meant that although the new arrivals faced far less resistance and were able to take control more easily, the exploitable labor force was very small.
Juan Vásquez de Coronado, who was sent as the new governor in 1562, is considered the real conqueror of Costa Rica. He explored the Central Highlands and valleys and in 1563-4 founded the city of Cartago, Costa Rica’s colonial capital.
He treated the natives more humanely than his predecessors, opting for the use of persuasive tactics to forge alliances and gain their cooperation, enabling him to make Cartago a permanent settlement and allowing the Spanish to gain their first real foothold in the region.
By the end of the 16th Century Spanish control was consolidated and the native population was largely wiped out. Whereas the encomienda system had initially allocated each landowner several hundred slaves, within a century most had only three or four, between the 1560s and 1611, the workforce had dropped by 70%, with only 7,000 – 8,000 natives remaining in the country. 7
In 1506 King Ferdinand of Spain sent a governor, Diego de Nicuesa, to colonize the Atlantic coast. The expedition was disastrous, the governor’s ships ran aground off the coast of Panama and he and his men were forced to march north along the inhospitable coast. Tropical diseases and starvation reduced the group by more than half and hostile natives used guerilla tactics to attack the strangers and burned or uprooted their crops to deny them food.
Over the next forty years several largely unsuccessful attempts were made to conquer this coast, all thwarted by the difficult terrain and climate and fierce indigenous resistance.
Explorers arriving on the Pacific coast had marginally more success. In 1522 Gil González Dávila explored the Pacific North, trading with the natives and receiving large amounts of gold, and in 1524 Francisco Fernández de Córdoba founded the first settlement, at Villa Bruselas. However, sickness, starvation, native attacks and disputes among the Spanish themselves eventually forced both expeditions to abandon the country.
While most of Central America was conquered between 1519 and 1523, with Spanish conquistadores moving down in two waves, from Mexico down and from Panama up, Costa Rica was largely left alone until 1560.
At this point King Philip II of Spain, together with the Royal representatives of the Kingdom of Guatemala – which had jurisdiction from the Chiapas region of Mexico as far as the southern border of Costa Rica – decided it was time to explore the interior of the country and ‘Christianize’ the natives. The King promised that future colonists could divide the indigenous population among themselves through a system of encomienda, whereby native family groups were allotted to landowners and obliged to provide labor, services and agricultural and artisan goods for at least two generations; in return their masters would ‘protect and Christianize them’.
However, by 1561, when Juan de Cavallón’s expedition arrived to penetrate the Central Valley region, establishing the small settlement of Garcimuñoz (now the Rio Oro de Santa Ana area), the epidemic diseases and fighting introduced by the earlier attempts to colonize, had decimated the indigenous population, reducing numbers to around 120,000 people. This meant that although the new arrivals faced far less resistance and were able to take control more easily, the exploitable labor force was very small.
Juan Vásquez de Coronado, who was sent as the new governor in 1562, is considered the real conqueror of Costa Rica. He explored the Central Highlands and valleys and in 1563-4 founded the city of Cartago, Costa Rica’s colonial capital.
He treated the natives more humanely than his predecessors, opting for the use of persuasive tactics to forge alliances and gain their cooperation, enabling him to make Cartago a permanent settlement and allowing the Spanish to gain their first real foothold in the region.
By the end of the 16th Century Spanish control was consolidated and the native population was largely wiped out. Whereas the encomienda system had initially allocated each landowner several hundred slaves, within a century most had only three or four, between the 1560s and 1611, the workforce had dropped by 70%, with only 7,000 – 8,000 natives remaining in the country. 7
