Limón

The province's character comes from a migration: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workers arrived from Jamaica and the wider British Caribbean to build the railway to the coast and then to work the banana plantations, and they stayed. What they brought is still audible and visible. Many older families speak an English-based creole at home — Limonese Creole, called Mekatelyu locally — alongside Spanish, which means a visitor with English may catch fragments of something familiar and not quite placeable. Calypso is the province's own music, played on guitar and banjo with lyrics that comment on local life, and it sits alongside reggae and soca in a coastal soundscape that belongs to the Caribbean rather than to Central America. The province holds the country's biggest carnival, a week of parades, music and street food that fills Puerto Limón and draws people back from all over Costa Rica. The kitchen is the other half of this inheritance and it is genuinely the best cooking in the country — coconut milk, thyme, Scotch bonnet, slow stews — which the food guide sets out in full. What matters here is that none of this is heritage staged for visitors. It is how the province lives, and the appropriate posture is that of a guest in a place with its own way of doing things rather than an audience.