Special surnames - Costa Rica Surname Map

The longest surnames in Costa Rica

Some surnames stand out for their length, but also for the history they carry with them. These are a few of the longest found in the country, with their origin and their distribution:

Montealegre – 11 letters. A Castilian toponymic surname formed from "monte" and "alegre", roughly "cheerful mountain". It is tied to one of the most influential families in nineteenth-century Costa Rican politics and is concentrated above all in the Central Valley.
Echeverría – 11 letters. Of Basque origin: etxe berria means "new house". It is one of the many Basque and Navarrese surnames that reached Central America during the colonial period.
Villalobos – 10 letters. Toponymic, from the town of Villalobos in the province of Zamora. In Costa Rica it is a frequent surname, spread widely across the whole territory.
Chinchilla – 10 letters. From Chinchilla de Montearagón, in Albacete. It happens to coincide with the name of the well-known Andean rodent, which gives it a curious air despite its purely geographical origin.

These surnames sum up rather well the mixture of origins that makes up Costa Rican naming: Castile, the Basque Country and the northern kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula.

Distinctive surnames and unexpected origins

Other surnames draw attention not for their length but because they sound like something else, or because they seem out of place in a Spanish-speaking country. There is almost always a migration story behind them:

Mora – One of the most common surnames in the country. It coincides with the Spanish word for blackberry and with the feminine of "moro", but its origin is toponymic: there are several places called Mora in Spain.
Chaves – Of Portuguese origin, taken from the town of Chaves in Trás-os-Montes. In Costa Rica it is spelt with a "v" far more often than with a "z", the opposite of what happens in Mexico or Spain.
Campbell – A Scottish surname that reached the Caribbean with Jamaican emigration. On the map it appears almost exclusively in the province of Limón.
Brown – Another surname of English origin with the same history: Afro-Caribbean workers hired for the Atlantic railway and later for the banana plantations.
Barrantes – From Extremadura, it is one of those surnames that are uncommon in Spain and that in Costa Rica, by contrast, have become very widespread from just a few founding families.

The contrast between the Central Valley and the Atlantic coast is probably the most striking feature of the Costa Rican maps: two sets of surnames with almost no overlap inside a small country. To these can be added the surnames of the native peoples, concentrated in Talamanca, Buenos Aires and the Nicoya peninsula.