This morning we met Dan at our hotel late morning and had our walking tour of some museums of San Jose.
Our first stop was the National Museum. It is the former headquarters of the army. It has also been a school and a jail. The entrance is pretty remarkable…a very large covered garden that is a butterfly garden.
A big attraction is the morpho butterfly with its marvelous, bright blue wings.
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| Blue Morphos Butterfly (underside of wings) |
We also got to see the owl butterfly. This one is very interesting. It has large dots on both wings which, when opened, looks like the eyes of an owl…so as to deter predators. When the wings are closed the markings on upper tips look like the head of a snake…also a deterrent. How clever of this butterfly.
We saw quite a number of caterpillars on the plants.
The ramps in the butterfly garden led us to the old jail area.
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| Jail Latrines |
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| Photo of old Congressional Building, in the Latrines |
From there we entered the museum proper with many pre-Colombian artifacts. Most were stone and pottery.
There was also a section that featured colonial families, garb and furniture.
There were also a lot of gold pieces.
The large courtyard had one of the huge petrospheres (with our guide Dan to show the size)...
and a sugar cane press.
We had good views of the park and city from one of the upper levels.
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More National Museum
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From here we walked to the nearby Jade Museum. Costa Rica and Central America were the land bridge between North and South America and much major trading occurred here. Costa Rica has no native jade but any jade objects from these trading times have been found around the country. So they have this jade museum.
Reflections in the museum.
The museum featured a lot of jade…
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| A very large raw jade stone |
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| Whistles |
and gold,
as well as a lot of pre-Columbian artifacts
and contemporary art.
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More Jade Museum
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There were also two large exhibition areas. The first was a Salvador Dali exhibition, Whimsical Dreams. We had never seen any of these works. Some might more accurately be described as nightmares.
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More Dali Exhibition
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There was also an exhibition of the paintings of Isisdor Con Wong. Wong was born in Costa Rica to Chinese immigrant parents. His paintings were very colorful and whimsical and many featured bulls.
One work was projected on the wall and had moving spots and flashes…a movie of art. Most interesting.
We opted to not
go to the gold museum as we had seen a lot of gold pieces, as well as pre‑Columbian
art in the other two museums. So we
opted for a visit to the National Theater instead. The building was built in 1897 using the
proceeds from taxes on coffee sales to Europe.
It was very opulent and beautiful.
It seats 1,140 people. The
inaugural performance was by a French company performing Goethe’s Faust.
The lobby had the original statues that used to be on the top of the building. The ones on the building now are copies. The originals were moved inside to protect them from bird droppings.
The main floor can be raised flush with the stage by a winding mechanism in the basement. It takes a number of people 1,000 turns on the turn wheel to raise the floor all the way up. It currently had seating on it when we visited.
The marble and art were from Italy, the wood from Costa Rica (they have 17 types of woods), French glass, and the floor mechanism and several parts of the interior were from Belgium. It seems it was an international theater.
The main auditorium was surrounded by opulent balconies.
There was a grand staircase to the upper levels with huge candelabra type lights.
The ceilings had wonderful murals (most by Italian artists)...
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| Mural above the stairs |
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| Dome details on the stairs |
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| Dome details on the stairs |
and chandeliers.
The wooden floors in the upper salon are mainly covered with carpet to protect them. But there are a couple of areas that expose the beautiful floors.
The grand salon upstairs was pretty magnificent with lots of Baroque and French detailing in gold.
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More National Theater
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The gardens in front of the National Theater.
From there we walked to the nearby Metropolitan Cathedral, the national cathedral of Costa Rica. It wasn’t nearly as opulent as the theater but it was lovely.
And, of course, there was lovely stained glass windows.
Just outside the cathedral was a statue commemorating a visit Pope John Paul II made to Costa Rica in 1983.
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More Metropolitan Cathedral
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After the tour we stopped for ice cream near a plaza.
There were lots of people feeding a huge lock of pigeons there. Something spooked them and there was an explosion of sound as they all launched into the air at the same time.
Sidewalk vendors selling gigantic, Costa Rican avocados.
We headed back to the hotel for a while and then went to a restaurant featuring Costa Rican food that Dan had suggested. We couldn’t find it but did find one with standard Costa Rican food so we tried it. The food was good. The typical Costa Rican dinner is rice, beans, salad and a meat. It was very tasty.
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