Dia de las Culturas

Dia de las Culturas: Reflections on Costa Rica’s Day of Cultures

Costa Rica has just celebrated Día de las Culturas, a national holiday on 12 October that recognises the country’s diverse heritage and the communities that continue to sustain it. The day was once known as Día de la Raza (Columbus Day). It was renamed in 1994 to acknowledge Costa Rica’s multiethnic and intercultural identity.

The change in name reflects an important shift in understanding. It acknowledges Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and migrant communities as central contributors to the national story. In a Latin American country widely celebrated for its beautiful beaches and diverse ecosystems, Día de las Culturas encourages a broader understanding of richness that includes people, histories and traditions.

Costa Rica’s Indigenous groups (among them the Bribri, Chorotega, Cabécar, Boruca, Maleku, Ngäbe, Térraba, and Huetar peoples) continue to maintain their own languages and cultural practices. Their knowledge of land and ecology informs daily life in ways that remain vital today. Yet these communities often receive limited visibility within the national cultural conversation; their presence acknowledged but not always actively engaged with.

For galleries and cultural organisations, Día de las Culturas offers a moment to consider what representation means. Whose stories are recorded, who is shown and how are perspectives framed? In contemporary art, these questions reach beyond inclusion. They point to the need for listening, for recognising different ways of seeing and understanding the world.

The fine art of oxcart painting has been passed down in families from generation to generation, especially in the Central Valley town of Sarchi

Conversations around Día de las Culturas encourages visibility and the coexistence of perspectives, and they appear across Latin American art today. In Costa Rica, institutions such as the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) have expanded their focus on regional and intercultural dialogues, presenting exhibitions like We Are Seas, Rivers, Flowers, Minerals, Volcanoes, Mountains, and Compost, which gathered over forty Central American and Latin American artists exploring feminist and ecological themes. Independent spaces such as TEOR/éTica continue to sustain these exchanges through research and residencies that examine belonging and collective memory within the wider Latin American context.

Together, they demonstrate how the ideas behind Día de las Culturas are not limited to a single day but continue to inform Costa Rica’s place within shared, evolving creative spaces across the region.

At MÍRAME, our work centres on contemporary fine art, the painters, photographers, and sculptors who are redefining what it means to make work in Costa Rica today. We do so with the awareness that we are outsiders to this context, learning from within rather than speaking for it. Día de las Culturas is a reminder to us of the wider landscape that surrounds us: the long histories and visual vocabularies that continue to inform creative practice. Contemporary art emerges from that continuity, inspired by ideas that endure across generations and by exchanges that link Costa Rica to wider artistic conversations.

Engaging with Costa Rica’s cultural life means recognising that artistic practice, whether Indigenous, rural, or urban, carries experiences and it's not for us to interpret those voices, but to make space for their presence and to approach them with care.

Día de las Culturas ultimately affirms plurality, and the coexistence of different ways of making, living and remembering within a small country of remarkable diversity. For those of us working in art, it is also a reminder of responsibility: to continue learning, to support spaces that widen access and to ensure that the act of looking begins with respect. Art is, after all, a record of what a culture notices. In Costa Rica, this day reminds us to look closely at the works on our walls and the histories that surround them.

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