Theme Day: Entry, adorned with Pre-Columbian Stone Sphere

The worldwide theme for Daily Photo websites for February 1 is "Entry."  This is the roadway entrance to the international airport in Liberia.

It has one of the stone spheres that date to as old as 200 B.C.  There are about 300 of them in Costa Rica.  There are two in Tamarindo, which I have shown in the past, although this one is larger.  The largest ones are about 2 meters (6.6 feet) in diameter, weighing 15 tons.

They have been unearthed at many locations scattered round Cost Rica, including the around the Gulf of Papagayo, which is very close to Liberia.

The opening scene from the first Indiana Jones movie featured one of these stones.

This week we have photos of Grenada, Nicaragua posted on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.

To see how other City Daily Photo bloggers have interpreted the theme of "Entry," use this link.

Monteverde canopy walk

Monteverde is a special place. Its cloud forest has a 2.5 km (1.5 mile) nature trail with 6 suspension bridge walkways like this one across ravines from one ridge to the next.

These walkways allow visitors to walk through, and look down upon, the canopy of trees at the roof of the cloud forest. The walkways are as high as 42 m. (138 ft.) above the ground and as long as 243 m. (797 ft.).

I will post a picture tomorrow of the view looking down on the canopy of trees, and additional photos of the cloud forest on the several days after that.

I will also provide some information on the history of Monteverde during the next few days. It is fascinating. It was founded by American Quakers who were faced with being drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and of course their religion did not permit them to take up arms. They read about Costa Rica abolishing its military and a group of 50 of them from Alabama decided to move to Costa Rica. They settled in Monteverde, which was an uninhabited mountainous area.

The Monteverde cloud forest was later identified as a threatened ecological treasure. School children in Sweden collected coins in the 1980's to purchase land to save the cloud forest, and their efforts were joined by school children from 44 nations. The Quakers also donated some of their land. More than 54,000 acres is preserved in what is called the Children's Eternal Rainforest, or Reserve Bosque Eterno de los Ninos.

Sunset cruise

This sail boat makes nightly sunset cruises from Tamarindo. The views from the water of the town, beaches, shoreline, and surrounding hills in the late afternoon light are delightful.

The staff serves a variety of food and drink, including slices of fresh fruit that are refreshing on a warm day. (And, yes, tourists from the USA and Canada can eat fresh fruit and drink tap water in Costa Rica with no problems. Costa Rica also uses the same electricity as the USA.)

My wife and I have taken this a sunset cruise, and if you are wondering whether there was there a sunset, please check tomorrow's photo.

The scene of a sailboat on the Costa Rican coast gives me an excuse to talk about the history of Costa Rica, which of course included the exploration and settlement of Costa Rica by Spanish sailing the coast. Columbus visited Costa Rica on his fourth voyage and spent 17 days on the Caribbean coast. (The Caribbean coast is quite different than the Pacific coast.) He made reports of natives wearing gold and silver, which of course prompted further Spanish expeditions, beginning with an unsuccessful attempt to establish a settlement in 1506.

A second attempt at colonization was made in 1522, this time on the Pacific coast. The gold possessed by the native population caused the expedition leader, Gil Gonzalez Davila, to give the area the name la costa rica, or "rich coast." The first permanent settlement in the country was on the Pacific coast in 1524. The indigenous people's gold, however, came from elsewhere and the Spanish did not find a significant source of local gold in Costa Rica. As a result, they enslaved some of the indigenous people to send them off to work in the gold and silver mines of Peru and Mexico, disease decimated the local population, and the Spanish generally overlooked the area for the next 250 years.

I will find an excuse in later posts to talk about later Costa Rican history, which includes independence from Spain, the decision of the Guanacaste region to join Costa Rica rather than Nicaragua, the resistance to an invasion by an army from the USA in the 1850's, and more contemporary events.

A major event was the country's decision in the late 1940's to discontinue its military and invest its funds in education and health care instead. Costa Rica has been a stable beacon of democracy in Central America, and its current President, Oscar Arias, won the Nobel Peace Prize due to his peace-maker role for the Nicaraguan conflict during his earlier term as President in the 1980's.