On the night of 1 August, the road from San José to Cartago fills with people walking in the dark. By the following evening close to two million will have made the journey.
It is the largest single act of participation in Costa Rican public life, and if you are new here it is the day that will tell you most about the country.
What the day commemorates
On 2 August 1635, a young woman gathering firewood at a place called La Gotera, on rough ground east of Cartago, found a small carved image of the Virgin on a rock. She took it home. It reappeared at the rock. She took it home again, and again it returned.
The parish priest read this as an instruction to build a hermitage on that exact spot, and one was built. The image is dark stone and no taller than a hand, and Costa Ricans call her La Negrita.
One point of terminology, because it is often got wrong: Costa Rica’s cultural heritage institute is careful to describe this as a hallazgo — a finding — rather than an aparición, an apparition. The image was found, and it stayed where it wished to stay.
In September 1824, the country’s first permanent Congress voted unanimously to declare the Virgen de los Ángeles the patroness of the State of Costa Rica. That makes the devotion older than most of the institutions of the republic, and 2024 marked its bicentenary.
The Romería
The pilgrimage — the romería — is a walk of roughly 22 kilometres from central San José to the Basílica in Cartago, along Ruta 2. The operational corridor the authorities manage runs a little longer than that.
Plenty of people start much further away and walk for days. Some come from Guanacaste. Some walk barefoot. Some carry children. The great majority simply set out in the evening of 1 August and arrive in Cartago through the night and the following morning.
Recent years have drawn close to two million participants across the surrounding days — estimates rather than counts, since nobody is counting turnstiles, but they come from the Church and the emergency services rather than from anyone selling anything.
In a country of about five million people, that is an extraordinary share of the population moving in one direction on one night.
What it takes to run it
The scale of the state operation around the romería is not widely appreciated. In recent years it has involved, across the peak days:
- Around 850 Red Cross responders and more than 145 emergency vehicles, working from a chain of humanitarian assistance stations along the route
- Roughly 500 Fuerza Pública officers and about 150 traffic police
- Health ministry teams positioned along the main route on the two busiest days
- Firefighters reinforcing the Cartago stations
- Something in the region of 3,000 municipal and inter-institutional personnel in total
- A dozen waste-collection points and recycling centres, under an “Eco Romería” programme
In the 2026 pilgrimage, 1,772 people were treated along the route, with 34 taken to hospital and no deaths. Around four kilometres of Ruta 2 are closed to traffic for the walk.
The most useful fact for anyone walking it
Health authorities report that close to 90% of the medical attentions along the route are down to physical over-exertion. Not accidents, not the traffic, not anything dramatic. People who have not walked 22 kilometres in years walking 22 kilometres, at night, often uphill.
The official message follows from that: pace yourself, drink water, and go to one of the assistance stations early rather than pushing through pain. They are staffed precisely for this.
A public holiday — but not the kind you think
This is where foreign residents and, frankly, plenty of employers get caught out.
2 August is a feriado under the Labour Code. But it is one of only two holidays in the Costa Rican calendar where payment is not obligatory — the other being 12 October. The distinction is real and it has practical effects.
Broadly: for employees paid monthly or fortnightly, the day already sits inside the salary period, and working it earns an additional day’s pay. For weekly-paid employees outside commerce, the employer is not obliged to pay for the day if it is not worked.
And it does not move. Costa Rica shifts several holidays to Mondays under a separate law; 2 August is deliberately not one of them. The date is the point — it is the anniversary of the finding, and it is observed on the day it falls.
The practical consequence: banks and government offices close, but because pay is not mandatory, many private businesses stay open. Treat it as a partial holiday rather than a guaranteed shutdown, and do not schedule anything official for it.
>The Basílica
The building at the end of the walk has been rebuilt repeatedly. The first structure on the site, in 1639, was a modest adobe chapel with a thatched roof. Colonial reconstruction in stone followed earthquake damage in the eighteenth century, and further rebuilding followed the earthquakes of 1822 and 1841.
The church standing today was designed by the architect Luis Llach in 1912, in a Byzantine style on a Greek-cross plan. Construction began that September; the façade was completed around 1930.
In 1935 Pope Pius XI granted it the perpetual status of Minor Basilica. It is also a declared national monument, protected under Costa Rica’s architectural heritage law.
If you are here for it
- You do not have to be Catholic to walk. Plenty of people walk for reasons that are personal rather than religious, and nobody asks.
- Start earlier than you think. The route is crowded through the night, and the last stretch into Cartago is slow.
- Use the assistance stations. They exist because most problems are exhaustion, and exhaustion responds well to stopping early.
- If you are driving on 1 or 2 August, don’t. Ruta 2 is closed in part and the surrounding roads are heavily policed. Plan around it.
- Separate your rubbish. The Eco Romería collection points are along the route and well signposted.
Why it is worth understanding
Costa Rica is a country that abolished its army, that legislates by citizen initiative, and that argues about very little with much passion. Once a year, two million of its people walk through the night to a small dark statue in Cartago.
You do not have to share the belief to see that it tells you something about the place you have moved to. If you want one day in the calendar to understand Costa Rica through, this is the one.
Making Costa Rica home?
The calendar here has a shape of its own, and the days that matter most are not always the ones marked in red.
CRIE — Costa Rica Immigration Experts handles residency applications, renewals, permanent residency and citizenship.
See the types of residency in Costa Rica, or get in touch.
Sources: the Centro de Investigación y Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural on the Basílica and the 1635 finding; the Ministerio de Trabajo on the holiday’s status under the Código de Trabajo; and the Ministerio de Salud and Cruz Roja Costarricense on the romería operation. Participation figures are estimates published by the Church and the authorities.
Thinking About Making Costa Rica Home?
Thousands of expats, retirees, and investors have made Costa Rica their permanent home. If you are considering residency, CRIE’s licensed immigration attorneys can walk you through your options — Pensionado, Rentista, Investor, or family-based — and handle every step of the process.