Americas · Central America

Costa Rica

5 cities in the atlas · 9 airports with scheduled flights

Plan a trip to Costa Rica Ask our visa desk

Talamanca Range-La Amistad Reserves · Photo: Marc Patry · CC BY-SA 3.0 igo · Wikimedia Commons

Capital: San José
Currency: CRC; Costa Rican Colón
Local time: Central Standard TimeUTC-06:00
Calling code: +506
Driving: On the right
Plugs: Type A and B

Facts

Costa Rica in figures

From named datasets: GeoNames, CLDR, the World Bank and Wikidata. Each is credited at the foot of the page.

Capital: San José
Currency: Costa Rican Colón CRCToday's indicative rate: CRC 100 ≈ USD 0.22Indicative, from the day's reference rates; a bank or card will charge its own.
Languages: Official: SpanishSpoken: Spanish and English
Time zones: Central Standard TimeUTC-06:00
Calling code: +506
Driving: On the right
Plugs: Type A and B120 V · 60 HzAs recorded in Wikidata.
Emergency numbers: 112ambulance, fire and police911general emergencyAs recorded in Wikidata. Check them locally on arrival; they are not the only safety information you need.
Population: 5,152,950 (2025, World Bank)
Area: 51,100 km²
Internet domain: .cr
Land borders: Nicaragua Panama

When to go

Climate across Costa Rica

On these averages, San José has a mean high between 18°C and 32°C and under 150 mm of rain in December to April.

Mild to warm and dry
Mild to warm, humid or showery
Hot
Cool
Wet
Cold

The main cities, month by month
City	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec
San José	27°	28°	30°	30°	28°	26°	27°	27°	26°	25°	26°	26°

Mean daily highs, modelled for an area about 50 km across: NASA POWER climatology, 2001–2020. A cell's swatch says what the month is like (key above).

On the map

Where Costa Rica is

The dashed box is the extent of the country's main landmass, from Natural Earth; outlying islands fall outside it. The dots are the cities with pages of their own.

Land borders

Cities

Cities in Costa Rica

All 5 places in the atlas: capitals, cities of 300,000 people or more, the places its airports serve, and the ones we have written guides to.

San JoséCapital335,007

Smaller places with an airport · 4

Airports

Airports in Costa Rica

Airports with scheduled flights and an IATA code, from OurAirports.

Large airports

Medium airports · 7

Photographs

Costa Rica in pictures

Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, each credited to its author, with its licence.

San José
Photo: Luis Manuel Madrigal Mena · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Visas and entry

Entry rules depend on your passport and change often, so this page does not state them. Check the destination government's official immigration website, or ask our visa desk to check your case for you.

Ask our visa desk

Plan it

Plan a trip to Costa Rica

Tell us where in Costa Rica, when and who is travelling, and a person puts the flights, the stays and the rest into one quote.

Plan a trip to Costa Rica All countries

Sources for this page

All sources and licences

GeoNames — Place data © GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.
OurAirports — Airport data from OurAirports (ourairports.com), public domain.
NASA POWER (Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources), Climatology API v2 — These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science/Applied Science Program.
Wikidata — Facts from Wikidata (wikidata.org), CC0.
Wikimedia Commons — Each photograph's author and licence are printed beside it.
Unicode CLDR 48.2.2 (cldr-json) — Unicode CLDR data, © Unicode, Inc., Unicode License v3.
Natural Earth v5.1.2, 1:10m admin-0 map units — Made with Natural Earth. Licence: Public domain
World Bank, World Development Indicators: Population, total (SP.POP.TOTL) — Population: World Bank, World Development Indicators (SP.POP.TOTL), CC BY 4.0.

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