Where is COSTA RICA located on the map?
Costa Rica, in long form the Republic of Costa Rica, is a unitary constitutional republic of Central America having a presidential regime.
Most of its territory is located on the Central American isthmus, bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, bordered to the north by Nicaragua and to the south-east by the Panama, which also includes Cocos Island located in the Pacific Ocean, more than 500 kilometers from the coast of the country. Its capital is San Jose. Their motto is “¡Vivan siempre el trabajo y la paz! (“Live forever work and peace!”)
Located on the isthmus that connects South America to North America, Costa Rica is a thin strip of land 200 km wide, which separates the Caribbean Sea to the east, Pacific Ocean to the west. The northern border of the country borders Nicaragua on 309 km, and that of the south, Panama on 330 km. The capital, San José, is in the center of the country.
This country has 1,290 km of coastline, including vast plains bordering the Caribbean Sea, on almost a third of the country, and narrower and more carved on the Pacific coast.
Costa Rica also extends into the Pacific Ocean by a small piece of land without inhabitants, Cocos Island, located 550 kilometers southwest of its west coast, in the direction of Isabela Island (belonging to the Republic of Ecuador).
Costa Rica is often nicknamed “Central America’s Switzerland“.
Since 2009, it has been ranked first in the world for the Happy Planet Index and in 2012 at the fifth place in the environmental performance index thanks to its active policy of developing renewable energies (hydro, wind, geothermal, which have enabled it since 2015 to lighting only with renewable energies) and protection of its natural resources.
According to the gender inequality index, Costa Rica is the most egalitarian country in Latin America in 2010. UNDP highlighted in the same year that Costa Rica is one of the few countries to have achieved much higher human development than other countries of similar economic development. For the year 2013, its human development index ranked seventh among Latin American countries and second in Central America.
In June 2017, Costa Rica had a population of 4,947,490, making it the 120th most populous country in the world and the fifth of seven countries in Central America, ahead of Panama and Belize.
Tourism is the main source of income. At the instigation of the President of the Republic (Oscar Arias), who declared “peace to nature”, Costa Rica has become a pioneer of ecotourism.
Ecotourism is extremely popular with foreign tourists visiting major national parks and protected areas that exist across the country. Costa Rica has been a pioneer in ecotourism and is recognized as one of the only international destinations to offer ecotourism. Costa Rica is in 44th place, the second country among Latin American countries after Mexico in the ranking of competitiveness index in tourism in 2011. The competitive advantages for developing tourism projects are in the area of human, cultural and natural resources, in which Costa Rica ranks 33rd in the world and ranks sixth in Latin America. The 2011 TTCI report also notes that the main weaknesses of Costa Rica’s tourism sector are, its small number of cultural sites (ranked 104), the time required to open a business, a business (ranked 125), the state of the art.
The majority of foreign visitors come from the United States (39%), Canada (7%) and the European Union (16%), which earns an average of about $ 1,000 USD per tourist. Tourism contributed 8.1% of GDP and accounted for 13.3% of direct and indirect jobs in 2005. Tourism has generated more revenue than all banana and coffee exports since the early 2000s.
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