Celebrating Guanacaste Culture
This past Saturday, 25 July, was Guanacaste Day — the anniversary of 1824, when the Partido de Nicoya voted to leave Nicaragua and join the newly independent Costa Rica. What's interesting about this day is that there was no war, no imposed treaty and no army. The people of Nicoya and Santa Cruz gathered in an open cabildo and voted; Liberia voted the other way, wanting to stay with Nicaragua, but the wider vote carried. Guanacaste became part of Costa Rica by its own choice. The region's motto is: De la Patria por nuestra voluntad, which translates as part of the homeland by our own will.
Over two hundred years later, Guanacaste culture still looks different from the rest of Costa Rica, with its music, its ranches and its festivals. The music of marimba, which arrived from Guatemala during the colonial period and took root so firmly in the province, later became Costa Rica's national instrument. Guanacaste has its own working culture in the sabanero and the cattle ranch, and a visual and craft tradition built by painters, craftspeople and whole communities.
Guanacaste Day is a good moment to see how that culture shows up in the work MÍRAME represents, and in the region itself.
One of the clearest examples of Guanacaste culture is not a single artist but a village. In 2002, visiting artists arrived in the small community of Islita, on the Nicoya Peninsula, and began working directly with residents on public artworks across the town — houses, the school, the community hall, the plaza. The following year, this became the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo al Aire Libre de Punta Islita, a museum without a single building, spread instead across the village, now recognised by the International Council of Museums.
Among the groups that grew from that first encounter were the women of Islita, many of them seamstresses, who began meeting under a papaturro tree in the village and found that the instincts of sewing translated naturally into the museum's new approach. Their murals and pieces are still part of the village today, alongside work from the visiting artists and the wider community who helped build the museum.
The museum is a must-see if you find yourself in the area, and visitors can buy directly from the women — wall-hangings, tapestries, paintings.
Christian Porras grew up in Guanacaste and works as a musician and a painter. these two practices inform one another. He translates the rhythms of his songs into blocks of bold colour and elliptical, fingerprint-like brushstrokes, folding rivers, beaches, and human figures onto the canvas. He has described the landscape as a stage, with a protagonist from ordinary Guanacaste life sometimes stepping into it: "The curved line is a brushstroke, but it is also an object, shape, and silhouette." His work depicts the daily Guanacaste life that independence was cast to protect.
Christian Porras, El Pipero Trepador, Acrylic on canvas, 58 x 50 cm, 22.8 x 19.7 in.
Milo Gonzalez was born in Moravia, north of San José. He often paints the bull, such as in Toro En Rojo, which is a large-scale painting of the animal, worked in Gonzalez's typical cubist-inflected ochre, red and black. This painting celebrates an animal at the centre of Guanacastecan life — the province's rodeos and topes, and the corrida a la tica — the traditional bloodless bull fights where the bull is never harmed or killed. The bull is presented as dominant, expressive and powerful. Gonzalez has described his process as instinctive: "The colours present themselves; they are not planned. They flow through me."
Milo Gonzalez, Toro En Rojo, Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 76.2 cm, 39.5 x 30 in.
Susan Adams has lived in Guanacaste for over 25 years, and her paintings are inspired by daily observation of the people around her: cowboys, dancers and the customs held onto at bull rings and in small stable yards. In La Misteriosa, a young Guanacaste woman leans against a stable door, her expression somewhere between candid and posed, as if caught mid-thought by whoever is behind the camera. The painting observes an intimate moment in the region, a part of the working, rural texture of the province. As Adams describes it: "Walk into my paintings; feel the action taking place or simply enjoy the moment in nature."
Susan Adams, La Misteriosa, Oil on canvas,
102 x 69 cm, 40.2 x 27.2 in.
Guanacaste Day marks the 1824 vote where the region became part of Costa Rica. Guanacaste culture today includes so many traditions that are celebrated daily in Guanacaste and have spread across the rest of Costa Rica.
Browse the full collection of Guanacaste-connected work on miramefineart.com, or get in touch to enquire about a piece.
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