Heredia

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Heredia

Heredia, one of the four provinces in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. Heredia was settled in the eighteenth century by Spanish and Creole farmers. Although it had rich volcanic soil, like the rest of Costa Rica, it had a minuscule indigenous labor force, and thus remained only sparsely settled. By 1824, the town of Heredia had still fewer than four thousand inhabitants. It became the provincial capital of Heredia Province in 1848, when the boundaries of the region were extended northward to include the Sarapiquí Valley.

During the twentieth century, Heredia became more closely tied to metropolitan San José, although the provincial capital still retains its legal identity. In 1972, Costa Rica established its second national university in Heredia.

See alsoCosta Rica .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carolyn Hall, Costa Rica: A Geographical Interpretation in Historical Perspective (1985).

Héctor Pérez-Brignoli, Las variables demográficas en las economías de exportación: El ejemplo del Valle Central de Costa Rica (1978).

Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided (1985).

Additional Bibliography

Ossa, A. de la. Sociedad civil y Resistencia pacífica en Centroamérica. San José: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 1998.

Meléndez Chavarri, Carlos. Heredia—historia, tradiciones y vivencias. Heredia: EUNA, 1997.

                              Virginia Garrard-Burnett

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