Surname Rankings in Costa Rica

Costa Rican surnames tell a distinctive story. Unlike other countries in the region, the colonial province was for centuries poor and thinly populated: a small number of founding families, settled mainly in the Central Valley, gave rise to a large share of today's population. The result is an unusual concentration of surnames, in which a handful of family names reach very high figures — Rodríguez, Vargas and Mora alone account for several hundred thousand people.

Added to that Castilian base are the contributions of the indigenous peoples, of the Afro-Caribbean communities of Limón — the source of surnames such as Brown, Campbell and Williams, which also appear in this list — and of the European, Chinese and Lebanese migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This ranking gathers the 500 most common surnames in the country, ordered by number of people. It is worth comparing it with the maps: a surname that is very frequent nationally may turn out to be concentrated in a single province.