Puntarenas (Centro)[District
1], which means "Sandy Point" in Spanish, is the
capital and main city in the province Puntarenas, Costa
Rica, at the Pacific coast. The homonymous and oddly shaped
province has its largest section in the South, far from
the capital.
Its port, Caldera,
is one of the main ports in the country. Some 100,000 live
in the city and close towns. With beaches on the Pacific
Ocean, it also attracts many tourists, especially surfers.
It is also a possible stopover point for the touristy Monteverde,
further inland.
History
First known as Villa Bruselas in colonial times, Puntarenas
was discovered by Hernán Ponce de León in
1519. Despite the use of the Gulf of Nicoya as an entryway
to Costa Rica's inland territory, the port of Puntarenas
was not developed until 1840 when coffee production in the
highlands reached exportable volumes. In 1845 the Congress
of the Republic declared Puntarenas a duty free port (with
the exception of Cognac and hard liquor). Originally, the
coffee was brought to port in oxcarts via a trail through
the mountains. In 1879, a stretch of railroad track was
completed which connected Puntarenas with the town of Esparza
(one of the country's earliest Spanish settlements, founded
in 1554, a decade before the Central Valley began to be
colonized) where the oxcart trail came out of the mountains.
Eventually, the railroad was built all the way through to
San José and service was inaugurated in 1910.
With the railroad connection to the
Central Valley, the Pacific port's activities continued
to be a major part of the region's economy throughout the
20th century. However, due to the aging and deterioration
of the port facilities and the need to accommodate the much
larger vessels of modern shipping fleets, a new port was
constructed in the 1980s to the south of Puntarenas. The
site chosen was Caldera, where ships had anchored during
colonial times.
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