The peoples of Costa Rica before the conquest looked in two directions, to Mesoamerica in the northwest, where the Chorotega kept versions of the Mexican gods and calendar, and to the Chibchan south, where the Bribri and Cabecar still transmit the world of Sibo, the creator who made humans from maize seed, through the awapa, the singing healers whose training takes decades. The colony that followed was a poor one, thin on gold and encomiendas, and its Catholicism grew correspondingly modest and parochial, centred on Cartago and the cult of its dark little Virgin, La Negrita.
Independence brought liberal and clerical quarrels, including the expulsion of bishops, but never the anticlerical ruptures of Mexico or Guatemala, and the 1949 constitution that abolished the army also kept Catholicism as the religion of the state, a provision that stands to this day. The modern country wears that establishment lightly: divorce, civil marriage and, since 2020, same sex marriage are law, a fifth of Costa Ricans profess no religion, and Evangelical churches have grown into a political force whose presidential near miss in 2018 turned a religious song and dance into a constitutional argument. The August pilgrimage to Cartago, when a large share of the whole nation walks to La Negrita, remains the annual measure of how Catholic the state church's people still are.