The Purple Culture Guide to Costa Rica

Chapter 1: First Impressions

The first thing that hits you isn't the lush green — it's the airport. Juan Santamaria is an ordinary, slightly tired international airport, and it sits in the middle of a sprawling, unremarkable city. If you've built your mental image of Costa Rica from a decade of glossy ads featuring capuchin monkeys and deserted beaches, the drive from Alajuela to San Jose will be your first reality check: strip malls, billboards, traffic jams, and the kind of low, concrete commercial buildings you'd see outside any midsize city in the American Midwest. It's not ugly, exactly, but it's not postcard material. That's the first surprise for almost everyone: this is a country with a modern economy and all the visual clutter that comes with it, not a Robinson Crusoe fantasy.

What is immediately different is the climate. You feel it the moment you step outside the terminal — a thick, warm humidity that wraps around you like a wet blanket. It's not brutal heat; it's more of an all-encompassing moisture that makes you aware of your own skin. If you've arrived in the dry season (roughly December to April), there's a hazy brilliance to the sky, and the hills in the distance look dusted with gold. If you've arrived in the green season (May to November), expect sudden, torrential downpours that begin with almost no warning, usually in the afternoon. Locals don't get alarmed by these — they carry umbrellas, wait for it to pass, and resume