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Inter-American Highway
The Inter-American Highway is the portion of the Pan-American Highway system that runs from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to Panama City, Panama, a total of 5,390 kilometers. The First Pan American Congress of Highways took place in October 1925 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the auspices of the Pan American Union. The congress was followed by a program of surveys and further meetings to discuss development of an inter-American highway system. In October 1929, representatives of the Central American countries, Mexico, and the United States met in Panama to establish ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Map of the Republic of Costa Rica
This 1891 map of Costa Rica shows the main physical features and administrative divisions of the country. The key, in the upper-right-hand corner, is in Spanish and English. Indicated on the map are the national capital, San José; provincial capitals; principal cities; minor cities; and railroads (in operation, under construction, projected, and “contracted for and soon to be built”). The highest mountains, volcanoes, and craters are indicated by the numbered key, and their heights given (inaccurately) in both feet and meters. The country’s seven provinces—Alajuela, Cartago, Guanacaste, Heredia ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Map of Guatemala: Reduced from the Survey in the Archives of that Country, 1826
On July 1, 1823, a Guatemalan National Constituent Assembly declared that the provinces that made up the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala, also known as the Kingdom of Guatemala, “are free and independent of old Spain, of Mexico, and of every other power.” The new country was called the United Provinces of Central America. It included the provinces of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. This 1826 map by Aaron Arrowsmith (1750-1826) thus covers the territory of the entire federation and not just Guatemala. Arrowsmith, who based his ...
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Library of Congress
A Feast Day in San José, Costa Rica
This photograph shows a religious parade in San José, Costa Rica, featuring a cross and white-clad young girls, some with wings, all held above the crowd. The photograph is from the collection of the Columbus Memorial Library of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes 45,000 photographs illustrative of life and culture in the Americas. Many of the photographs were taken by prominent photographers on OAS missions to member countries. The OAS was established in April 1948 when 21 countries of the western hemisphere adopted the OAS Charter ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Pilgrims at Cartago
This photograph from Costa Rica shows pilgrims in traditional dress and head wraps, some with blackened faces. Every year, thousands of devotees from across Costa Rica make a pilgrimage on foot to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, the national religious shrine, to honor the Virgin Mary and pay homage for favors granted. The pilgrimage coincides with the feast day of the Virgin of the Angels, held on August 2, to commemorate the miraculous appearance (and subsequent reappearance) of a small, carved image of Mary to a young ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Playing the Marimba
This photograph from Costa Rica shows a marimba player accompanied by two guitarists. The marimba, believed to have originated in southern Africa, was brought to South America in the early 16th century by Africans taken there as slaves. In the 1890s, the Guatemalan marimba builder Sebastian Hurtado made an instrument with a wooden resonator pipe instead of a gourd, an innovation that formed the basis of the modern marimba. The photograph is from the collection of the Columbus Memorial Library of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes 45 ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Map of the Provinces of Nicaragua and Costa Rica
Jacques Bellin (1703-72) was a prolific cartographer attached to the French Marine Office. In 1764, he published Le Petit Atlas Maritime (Small maritime atlas), a work in five volumes containing 581 maps. Nicaragua and Costa Rica, shown in this map from the second volume of the atlas, were at the time provinces of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, part of the Spanish Empire. The left side of the image shows the title page of Bellin’s atlas. Nicaragua and Costa Rica both declared independence from Spain in 1821.
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Library of Congress
Map of Central America Including the States of Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, the Territories of Belise and Mosquito, with Parts of Mexico, Yucatan and New Granada: Engraved from the Original Drawing of John Baily
John Baily was an Englishman who lived for many years in Central America. He was employed in 1837-38 by the government of Nicaragua to survey a potential canal route from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. This map, published in London in 1850, was accompanied by a book, Central America, published separately, which contained much of the detailed information that Baily gathered to make this map. The map shows four possible canal routes: one surveyed for the government of Costa Rica in 1848 by the Danish engineer Andres Oersted ...
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Library of Congress