173 Custom map of Costa Rica

Located in the Central America between Nicaragua and Panama, Costa Rica packs an amazingly diverse ecosystem into a tiny 51, 120km(19, 739 sq miles) of land. The small democratic country covers only 0.03 % of the surface of the globe, and shelters 5% of the existing biodiversity in the entire world. Around 2 million of Costa Rica’s 4.8 million people live in the capital of San Jose. At one point in time, 75% of Costa Rica was forest, until economic expansion and the demand for tropical hardwoods in the 1960s and 70s resulted in massive deforestation of the region. Today, roughly 27 % of the country is composed of conservation and natural protected territories, and is one of the world’s prime ecotourism areas. The country is shaped by rugged highlands, high mountain ranges such as Mount Chirripo which has a variety of climates and vegetation zones, the Caribbean Coast which is hot and humid, rain forest in west, and the much drier Pacific Coast. Many of the country’s habitats are interc