Alajuela is a province of Costa Rica. It is located in the north-central part of the country, bordering Nicaragua to the north. It also borders the provinces of Heredia to the east, San José to the south, Puntarenas to the southwest and Guanacaste to the west. As of 2011, the province had a population of 885,571. Alajuela is composed of 16 cantons, which are divided into 111 districts. It covers an area of 9,757.53 square kilometers.
Julieta Pinto was a Costa Rican educator and writer. She was a recipient of the Aquileo J. Echeverría Award.
Joaquín Gutiérrez Mangel was a Costa Rican writer who won multiple awards, and whose children's book Cocorí has been translated into ten languages. In addition to writing children's books, Gutiérrez was a chess champion, war correspondent, journalist, story-teller, translator, professor, and communist activist.
Jorge Eduardo Arroyo-Pérez is a Costa Rican writer, playwright, opinion columnist, essayist, poet and theater director. He is currently Costa Rica's ambassador to UNESCO.
José María Cañas Escamilla was a Salvadoran military figure. He was born in Suchitoto, El Salvador.
The Academia Costarricense de la Lengua is an association of academics and experts on the use of the Spanish language in Costa Rica. It was founded in San José on October 12, 1923. It is a member of the Association of Spanish Language Academies.
Alberto Cañas Escalante was a politician, writer, intellectual, public servant, and journalist from San José, Costa Rica. He is known as one of the most important figures in the cultural, political, and social life of Costa Rica during the latter half of the twentieth century. The National Library System of Costa Rica credits Cañas with more than 4,773 publications as of 2005.
María Elena Carballo is a Costa Rican politician. She was the Minister of Youth and Culture in Costa Rica in 2006–2010.
Carlos Gagini (1865–1925) was a Costa Rican intellectual, philologist writer, esperantist and linguist.
Yolanda Oreamuno Unger was a Costa Rican writer. Her most acclaimed novel is La Ruta de su Evasión (1948). Her 40 years of life were markedly divided into two phases: the first 20 years, filled with youth, beauty and happiness, contrasted sharply with the following years of tragedy, loneliness and sickness.
Italian Costa Ricans are Costa Rican-born citizens who are fully or partially of Italian descent, whose ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Costa Rica during the Italian diaspora, or Italian-born people in Costa Rica. Most of them reside in San Vito, the capital city of the Coto Brus Canton. Both Italians and their descendants are referred to in the country as tútiles. There were over 380,000 Costa Ricans of Italian descent, corresponding to about 7.5% of Costa Rica's population, while there were around 2,300 Italian citizens.
Margarita Carrera Molina was a Guatemalan philosopher, professor and writer. She was a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua and the 1996 laureate of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.
Anacristina Rossi is a Costa Rican writer.
Emilia Prieto Tugores was a graphic artist, educator, singer, composer, and scholar of folklore from the Central Valley of Costa Rica, one of the few women to enter the field of artistic satire in the first half of the 20th century. Her work was recognized with a Joaquín Monge Prize for cultural periodism in the 1984. Studying her native folklore, Prieto's collection of songs "influenced [a] generation of troubadours". The Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial Emilia Prieto Tugores was named for her, and awarded for the first time, in 2015.
Roxana Pinto Lopez is a Costa Rican poet, novelist and essayist.
Liberalism in Costa Rica is a political philosophy with a long and complex history. Liberals were the hegemonic political group for most of Costa Rica's history especially during the periods of the Free State and the First Republic, however, as the liberal model exhausted itself and new more left-wing reformist movements clashed during the Costa Rican Civil War liberalism was relegated to a secondary role after the Second Costa Rican Republic with the development of Costa Rica's Welfare State and its two-party system controlled by social-democratic and Christian democratic parties.
The Olympus Generation, also called the 900 Generation, is the name given in Costa Rica to a group of intellectuals, teachers, historians, politicians and writers of liberal and positivist thought, whose ideas and philosophical, political, academic and cultural contributions were reflected in the sciences, arts, literature and politics between 1890 and 1920, this was the historical stage of Costa Rica where the liberal state is consolidated. Traditionally, they're known as the Olympus generation in reference to the Olympian gods of classical mythology, because most of them belonged to an oligarchic elite with political and economic power obtained from the international coffee trade during the second half of the 19th century. This was the nickname given by their detractors due to the arrogance of many of its members. The Olimpo generation played a leading role in the gestation of culture, national identity and the consolidation of the Costa Rican State.
Julieta Dobles Yzaguirre is a Costa Rican poet, writer, and educator. She is a five-time winner of the Aquileo J. Echeverría Award and received the Magón National Prize for Culture in 2013.
Adolfo Constenla Umaña was a Costa Rican philologist and linguist who specialized in the indigenous languages of Central America. He is especially known as a leading scholar on Chibchan languages.
Alicia Miranda Hevia is a Costa Rican writer. She is known for her literary work, as well as for founding the small press Editorial Montemira.
