Home education has no legal recognition in Costa Rica. The law requires enrolment in a teaching centre, and there is no ministry pathway for a child aged six to thirteen educated at home.
The bars are not a measure of danger. Residential burglary has fallen 34% since 2019 — the grilles exist so the windows can stay open all year.
Costa Rica has twelve national holidays, nine with obligatory pay. The rule moving holidays to Mondays expired at the end of 2024 — most guides still get this wrong.
Selling sex by an adult is not a criminal offence in Costa Rica, but it is unregulated rather than legal — and the law on minors is severe, age-gap based and recently strengthened.
Every 2 August close to two million people walk to Cartago. What the day commemorates, how the pilgrimage works, and why it is a holiday where pay is not obligatory.
Medicinal cannabis and hemp are legal under Ley 10113. Recreational use is not, home growing sits inside the trafficking offence, and there is no permitted possession quantity.
Costa Rica banned sport hunting in 2012 through the first citizen-initiated law in its history. Subsistence and control hunting remain lawful, and sport fishing is unaffected.
On 8 March 2005 three brothers attacked the Banco Nacional in Monteverde. Twenty-eight hours later nine people were dead, including a police officer killed in the assault the President authorised.
The Brothers took about US$405 million from more than 6,200 depositors before collapsing in 2002. What the courts found, which brother was convicted, and what depositors recovered.
Costa Rica homicides rose 60% in four years, then plateaued. But 74% are score-settling within criminal networks, and property crime has been flat. Here is where the risk actually sits.
