Costa Rica, a narrow land of volcanoes, cloud forest and two coasts between Nicaragua and Panama, was first entered by Paleoindian hunters at the end of the Ice Age, whose spear points lie at Turrialba. Farming villages grew up around Lake Arenal, and from about 500 BC the chiefdoms of Gran Nicoya, the Central Valley, the Caribbean slope and the Diquís worked jade and gold, painted polychrome pottery, carved ceremonial metates and, from about AD 300, the perfect stone spheres of the south. Chorotega and Nicarao migrants brought Mesoamerican ways to the north-west, while Chibchan-speaking peoples such as the Huetar, the Bribri and the Cabécar held the centre, the east and Talamanca.

Columbus anchored at Cariari in 1502, and Gil González Dávila reached Nicoya in 1522, but the land the Spanish named Costa Rica had little gold and few labourers. Cartago, founded in 1563, remained a poor and remote province of the Kingdom of Guatemala, ringed by Talamancan resistance, cacao plantations at Matina and Miskito and pirate raids; its small farmers, with few great estates, laid the foundations of a more equal society. Heredia, San José and Alajuela grew up around the tobacco monopoly and, after 1779, around coffee. Independence came almost by accident in 1821, followed by the Ochomogo civil war of 1823, the annexation of Nicoya in 1824 and a stormy membership of the Federal Republic of Central America until Braulio Carrillo took Costa Rica out in 1838.

Coffee made the Republic proclaimed in 1848. President Juan Rafael Mora led the national campaign against the filibuster William Walker in 1856–57, only to be overthrown and shot; Tomás Guardia ruled by coup from 1870 and began the Atlantic railway, and the Liberal governments of the 1880s built schools, museums and the National Theatre, while bananas and the United Fruit Company transformed Limón. The Tinoco dictatorship of 1917–19 gave way to elections, social reform and the Communist Party, the Social Guarantees of 1943 and the Labour Code; a disputed election led to the civil war of 1948, after which José Figueres abolished the army, nationalised the banks and wrote the Constitution of 1949. The Second Republic added the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, public universities, national parks and, under Óscar Arias, the Esquipulas peace plan and a Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. Today Costa Rica, a stable democracy without an army, balances ecotourism, microchips and coffee with migration, debt, drought and an increasingly polarised politics under President Laura Fernández.