Costa Rica document photos online

Costa Rica is the country that fired its own army and never looked back. On December 1, 1948, President Jose Figueres Ferrer took a sledgehammer to a wall of the Bellavista barracks and abolished the military, a decision written into the 1949 constitution that redirected defense budgets into schools and clinics. UNESCO later inscribed the act in its Memory of the World register. The payoff shows on every modern Costa Rican passport, which devotes its pages to four national pillars: Biodiversity, Renewable Energy, Education and Peace, and Talent, and today opens doors to roughly 148 destinations, the strongest travel document in Central America.

• Passport power On the Henley Passport Index 2025, Costa Rica's passport ranks around 24th worldwide with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 148 destinations, the most powerful passport in all of Central America.
• Passport design Costa Rica's biometric passport, rolled out in March 2022, themes its pages around four national values, Biodiversity, Renewable Energy, Education and Peace, and Talent, rather than the usual generic patterns.
• No army Costa Rica abolished its armed forces in 1948-49, becoming the first nation in the world to constitutionally do so, and channelled the saved money into education and healthcare, an act UNESCO added to its Memory of the World register.
• Currency origin The Costa Rican colon is literally named after Christopher Columbus, who is called Cristobal Colon in Spanish, and it replaced the old Costa Rican peso at par back in 1896.
• Money & wildlife Instead of dead presidents, Costa Rica's banknotes show living wildlife, sloths on the green 10,000, bull sharks on the blue 2,000 and capuchin monkeys on the yellow 5,000, each note colour-coded to a national ecosystem.
• Vanishing coins Small change is disappearing in Costa Rica: the central bank has scheduled the 5, 10 and 25 colon coins to lose legal-tender status on July 1, 2026, quietly rounding the smallest denominations out of existence.
• Longevity zone The Nicoya Peninsula is one of the world's five Blue Zones, where roughly one in 250 people reaches 100, and a study found a 60-year-old Nicoyan man is about seven times more likely to become a centenarian than a Japanese man.
• Democracy record Costa Rica holds one of the longest unbroken democratic track records in Latin America, a stability that helps explain why its identity documents and passport are trusted far beyond a country of just over five million people.
• Pura vida The national catchphrase pura vida (pure life) doubles as hello, goodbye, thanks and I'm fine, and it is stamped so deeply into local identity that it functions as an unofficial slogan of the whole country.