San José

Costa Rica does not use street numbers in everyday life, and the capital is where a visitor first collides with that. An address here is a distance and a direction from a landmark: two hundred metres north and fifty east of a named church, a hundred metres south of a particular supermarket, opposite the second entrance of a park. The unit is the block — a hundred metres means one block regardless of how long the block actually is — and the compass bearings are used constantly and confidently, which takes practice if you are used to left and right. Then it gets better: some of the landmarks are historical. The most famous reference point in one eastern district is a fig tree that was cut down decades ago and is still cited daily by people who never saw it. None of this is a joke at the visitor's expense; it is simply how the country works, and taxi drivers, delivery riders and everyone else navigate it fluently. What it means in practice is that you should have your accommodation's directions in the local form rather than only a pin, that mapping apps work but will sometimes put you a block out, and that asking someone is normal and expected rather than a failure. The grid downtown is regular and walkable, avenues running east to west and streets north to south, so the centre itself is easy once you accept the system.

Three collections are worth the day on their own. The gold museum, built underground beneath a central plaza, holds an enormous collection of pre-Columbian goldwork — figures, shamanic pieces, animal forms of extraordinary delicacy — displayed with the archaeology rather than as treasure, and it reframes the whole isthmus as a place with deep history rather than only ecology. The jade museum, in a purpose-built modern block nearby, is the largest collection of pre-Columbian jade in the Americas and is the better of the two for understanding daily life, cosmology and craft. The national museum occupies a former barracks on a hill at the eastern end of the centre, still showing the pockmarks of the fighting that ended in the army's abolition in 1949, and it runs from pre-Columbian material through colonial and republican history to the present — with a butterfly garden in the courtyard that visitors do not expect. Between them sits the national theatre, an 1890s opera house built with a tax the coffee growers levied on themselves, ornate to a degree that is startling in this city, and open for short guided visits as well as performances. The café inside is the pleasantest place downtown to sit down.

The central market has been running since the 1880s: a covered warren of butchers, fishmongers, spice and herb stalls, flower sellers, leatherwork and, most usefully, a dense concentration of sodas serving the country's everyday plates to people who work nearby. It is the best and cheapest lunch downtown and it is the place to try what the food guide describes rather than reading about it. Around the edges of the old centre, two neighbourhoods reward a walk. One immediately north preserves a run of nineteenth-century coffee-baron mansions in wood and tin and brick, several now small hotels, cafés and galleries, and it is the closest the city comes to conventionally handsome. The other, to the east, has become the country's serious eating and drinking district over the past decade — a few streets of restaurants, craft-beer bars, bakeries and third-wave coffee that would not be out of place in a far larger city, and the single best argument for staying the night rather than passing through. West of the centre a large park occupies the site of the old airport, with the art museum in the former terminal building, and it is where the city goes to run, play football and picnic at the weekend. A weekly organic farmers' market in the north-east is the other local institution worth timing a visit for.

Two practical things shape a stay here. The first is that there is no central bus station. Long-distance services leave from a scattering of separate terminals and company offices around the city depending on the destination and the operator, which is the single most confusing thing about travelling onward by bus and is worth confirming the day before rather than the morning of — the transport guide covers the national picture, including the shuttle services that pick up from hotels and remove the problem entirely. The second is that the city is easy to walk in the centre and unpleasant to drive in: one-way systems, heavy traffic and difficult parking. Ride-hailing apps and official taxis both work well and are inexpensive, and a hire car is best collected on the day you leave rather than kept in the city. On where to stay, the historic mansion district and the eastern eating district are both pleasant, safe and well connected, and both are better choices than the immediate downtown blocks, which empty out and are best avoided on foot late at night — ordinary city sense applies here as the health and safety guide sets out, with petty theft rather than anything worse being the realistic risk. The climate needs no adjustment at all: at this altitude the valley sits in a mild spring all year, warm days and cool evenings, and it is the most comfortable weather in the country.