
It’s July 25, 1824 and a group of about 25 Nicoyans, the vast majority of whom are mulattoes, are drafting an act in the town hall, a large adobe house built using the bahareque technique. In the document, they are writing down their expectations when joining a newly formed country.
One of the things they write down is “the immediate and reciprocal participation in the benefits and advances that are palpable in the state of Costarrica [sic].”
That’s the scene in which the Act of the Annexation of the Party of Nicoya to Costa Rica was drafted, 200 years ago. That writing is now one of the most important events in the history of Costa Rica.
What did the then Party of Nicoya demand when annexing to the country? And what did they ask for during the centennial of the celebration, in 1924? The Voice of Guanacaste travels back in time to explain these two historical moments in detail and see them through today’s lenses, within the framework of the celebration of the annexation’s bicentennial.
The expectations
The group didn’t really require any demands of Costa Rica, believes Gina Rivera, who has a master’s degree in history and is a professor at the University of Costa Rica (UCR).
“What can be read or analyzed is [that they asked] to be an integral part of that economic and political opportunity that Costa Rica was offering,” says the historian, an opportunity different from what Nicaragua offered since it was in a constant civil war.
That does not mean that in Costa Rica, there are no coups d’état, that there are no quarrels between the coffee oligarchy,” she adds.
And what were the main ambitions? Political stability and economic facilities, mainly with a coffee project and with trade through the “Puerto de Punta de Arena,” today Puntarenas.
“The economic flow between Nicoya, Puntarenas and the Central Valley is very important to determine this, for example, tobacco or liquor stores,” explains Rivera.
In another line on the paper, they wrote that “the same people of this Party should be protected for the creation of schools.”
That would be one of the guidelines of the act in which results began to be seen in a couple of decades.
In 1846, the Ministry of Relations and Government (the Ministry of Public Education did not exist at that time) ordered the construction of schools in Nicoya, Santa Cruz, Bagaces and Cañas.
In that year, there were 707 students and 12 teachers in Guanacaste, a figure “relatively high compared to the rest of Costa Rica and to the population in this and the other provinces,” Victor Cabrera, a journalist and educator from San Jose, reported decades later.
Back at the town hall, the mulattoes wrote in the act that “they find themselves absolutely in a deplorable situation without funds and without weapons to maintain themselves.”
Paradoxically, that town hall where they were located ended up collapsing 100 years later due to neglect.
On July 18, 1925, the Diario de Costa Rica newspaper reported that “the Nicoya Town Hall had collapsed, a very ancient building located in front of the plaza and considered a historical relic.”
And what began as motivations of the people who signed the act to join the country began transforming into demands from local political elites and an emerging Guanacaste press.
100 years later
In 1924, the decision to celebrate the annexation of the Party of Nicoya seemed to be more for political purposes than anything else, according to the analysis of historian Soili Buska in a research paper called “Guanacaste: The emergence of a regionalist discourse.”
In the text, she explains that the first initiative to commemorate the centennial of the annexation arose in July of 1923, a year before the centennial.
The presidential election campaign was about to begin (voting was in December of that year) and discussions in the Constitutional Congress were seeking to win votes, and not to recognize the concerns and needs of the province.
One of the decisions of Congress to commemorate the centennial was to allocate a significant budget for “development works for Guanacaste.”
Congressman Ricardo Jiménez Oreamuno — who would become president in 1924 — proposed a package of infrastructure projects for the province, among which stood out: the construction of pipes, a school, and a municipal building for Nicoya; a hospital for Santa Cruz; repairs to the Puerto Jesús dock; and the bridge over the Tempisque River between Carrillo and Liberia.
Just a month later, the Diario de Costa Rica criticized that the amounts allocated for each project were very low.
The first commemoration proposals and the suggestion of ways how to carry it out came from two Nicoyans: Congressman Leonidas Briceño and teacher Higinio Vega. The latter had received a scholarship to study at the Normal School in 1907 and was among the first promoters of Guanacaste pride in the national press.

Portrait of the Nicoyan teacher Higinio Vega, main proponent of the book commemorating the centennial of the annexation.
Vega proposed preparing a Guanacaste history book for future generations since he believed that “one hundred years later, the hand of progress would have erased everything.”
The past was important, but also the future: as in 1924, it was important to recognize the heroes of the province, in 2024, we would have to look back at the Guanacaste of before,” he said.
This document would materialize in 1924 under the name “Commemorative Book of the Centennial of the Incorporation of Nicoya into Costa Rica,” a work by journalist and educator Víctor Cabrera.
It’s a compilation of colonial chronicles, maps, photographs, censuses and general information about the province from the conquest to the first centennial. The book also mentions what the setbacks were during the first 100 years of annexation.
If we go back to what was written in the act, were “the benefits and advances that are palpable in the state of Costarrica [sic]” received, as the people who signed it requested?
Regarding roads, he documented that they were relatively good, but they had the disadvantage that during the rainy season, they turned into “long and continuous mudflats or true lagoons.”
Furthermore, a Guanacaste correspondent for Prensa Libre criticized the state of the roads in 1900.
“The distance that Guanacaste is from the population centers and the difficulties that exist in communicating with the capital of the Republic due to the lack of expeditious and comfortable routes to travel are more than enough reasons for us to march so slowly along the paths of civilization,” he noted.
And he continued with his complaint toward the politicians, reproaching them that “to add insult to injury, not even the main authorities that have governed the province ever cared about the well-being and advancement of these towns that should, for many reasons, be the most flourishing in the country.”
The roads law has been ineffective and has never been fulfilled,” he criticized.
Historian Gina Rivera affirms that this complaint has existed since colonial times.
“It’s very interesting, but since the 16th century, people who live in Costa Rican territory have complained that there are no appropriate land travel routes. And we have to wait until the second half of the 20th century so that we really have direct communication with the Central Valley through highways, even though they are collapsing all the time,” Rivera emphasizes.
In a section called Railway Projects in the book about the centennial, Cabrera explains that in Guanacaste, there are two blueprints of railway lines, “which, once executed, will put it in rapid, prompt and comfortable travel to the interior of the country and to the Republic of Nicaragua.”
One of the projects was called the International or Pan-American Railway, and it proposed crossing Liberia, Bagaces and Cañas. And the other was called Railway to the North, and it would pass through the depression located between Miravalles and Tenorio, and through the city of Liberia to end in Puerto del Coco, today Playas del Coco, in Carrillo.
As if it weren’t ambitious enough, on the same page, it mentions that through special laws from 1912 and 1916, the construction of another railway would be proposed that would run through the cantons of Nicoya, Santa Cruz, Filadelfia and Liberia, also ending in Puerto del Coco.
On the subject of economics, the book points out that the “economic development of Guanacaste has been relatively slow, especially in the northern region of the province.”

Retrato del diputado nicoyano Leonidas Briceño.
Trade through the “Puerto de Punta de Arena” was useful for cantons in the southern part of the province such as Nicoya and Santa Cruz. The products from these cantons, which only reached the Puntarenas markets, could be marketed to the center of the country after the construction of the Pacific Railway.
This was not the case in other cantons such as Liberia, Philadelphia and Bagaces. The book affirms that for most of these towns, it was more convenient to resort to the markets of Rivas, in Nicaragua, than to those in the interior of Costa Rica.
And what about “the creation of schools?” A chapter called School Regime points out that the benefits of the General Common Education Law have been less intense in the province of Guanacaste than in the rest of the country due to how remote the populations are in the province and their topographical and travel conditions.
Guanacaste historian Dorian Chavarría reinforces this nonfulfillment of the Costa Rican state with another example.
In the field of education, even a century later, this progress was not seen. When did we [finally] have the first high school in the province? It wasn’t until 1948. That’s a long time later,” Chavarría emphasizes.
The promise of a big party
The same research by historian Buska highlights that Guanacaste’s intellectuals and activists who promoted the annexation centennial succeeded in having their proposal for a large-scale celebration be well received in congress. Although again, it’s most likely that the reasons had to do with immediate electoral interest and not the long-term development of the region.
The central government moved the official centennial celebration to February of 1925 to have enough time to prepare “the official gift” and so that “high-ranking officials could attend the aforementioned events.”
The Nueva Prensa news correspondent in Nicoya was not very convinced that something was going to happen in his town 15 days before the celebration.
“Possibly the Centennial festivities have gone down in the catalog of friendly idealities, because at this time, there is nothing more than talk of preparations. The commission is a decorative figure that would be better found in an entryway,” he published.
In the end, the centennial ended up being celebrated only in Nicoya and not in the entire national territory. It wasn’t celebrated on July 25 either. They postponed it to February of 1925, waiting for senior officials to be able to attend. Finally, the representation was “insignificant and without positive consequences,” historian Buska documented in an article in the Nueva Prensa.
A Nicoyan named Juan Guevara published an article in the Nueva Prensa on March 2, 1925 to comment on the low level of the celebration.
The oversight, the contempt in which we live and are increasingly relegated, engenders in our souls feelings of protest that won’t take long to crystallize into real acts to claim our rights at the mercy of our ill-wishers,” he wrote.
Juan Guevara had a point. The bitter taste that the centennial celebration generated among intellectuals and activists in Guanacaste gave way to a regional political organization, which emerged with force a decade later: the Guanacastecan Brotherhood party, founded by Dr. Francisco Vargas Vargas, a distinguished honoree of the homeland.
The milestone was never repeated, according to historian Gina Rivera.
“We haven’t worked on a project in Guanacaste to generate political successors. Not like the magic wand of ‘I choose you as my successor,’ but rather a political education project so that we can really develop the regions,” she affirms.
Regarding this idea, Dorian Chavarría also believes that the Guanacaste population should be more involved in the province’s progress.
“Let it be a date that serves to reinforce our identity and also to reinforce that in this historical progression throughout these years, we don’t have to wait for everything to fall down to us from the sky,” she believes.
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