Thanks to its occupants' freewheeling mercantilist ways, San Jose flourished and quickly grew to equal Cartago in size: by the 1820s, Cartago and San Jose each had slightly more than 5,000 inhabitants, Heredia half that number, and Alajuela a little more than 1,800. San Jose quickly developed a lucrative monopoly on the tobacco trade and made the most, too, of the booming coffee trade. Tobacco profits funded civic buildings; by the close of the 18th century, San Jose already had a cathedral fronting a beautiful park, a currency mint, a town council building, and military quarters.

Independence
When the surprise news of independence from Spain came by mail to the Meseta Central in October 1821, the councils of the four cities met to determine their fate, and a constitution - the Pacto de Concordia - was signed, its inspiration derived from the 1812 Spanish Constitution. Alas, says historian Carlos Monge Alfaro, early Costa Rica was not a unified province, but a "group of villages separated by narrow regionalisms." Each of the four cities felt and acted as freely as had the city-states of ancient Greece. The conservative and aristocratic leaders of Cartago and Heredia, with their traditional colonial links, favored annexation into a Central American federation led by Mexico; the more progressive republican forces of San Jose and Alajuela, swayed by the heady revolutionary ideas ascendant in Europe, argued for independence. A bloody struggle for regional control soon ensued.

On 5 April 1823, the two sides clashed in the Ochomogo Hills. The victorious republican forces, commanded by an erstwhile merchant seaman named Gregorio Jose Ram'rez, then stormed and captured Cartago. In a gesture that set a precedent to be followed in later years, the civilian hero Ram'rez relinquished power and retired to his farm, then returned to foil an army coup.

San Jose thus became the nation's capital city. Its growing prominence, however, soon engendered resentment and discontent. In March 1835, in a conciliatory gesture, San Jose's city fathers offered to rotate the national capital among the four cities every four years. Unfortunately, the other cities - Alajuela included - had a bee in their collective bonnet. In September 1837 they formed a league, chose a president, and on 26 September attacked San Jose in an effort to topple the Braulio Carrillo government. The Josefinos won what came to be known as La Guerra de la Liga (The War of the League), and the city has remained the nation's capital ever since.

By the mid-1800s the coffee boom was bringing prosperity, culture, and refinement to the once-humble backwater. San Jose developed a substantial middle class eager to spend its newfound wealth for the social good. The mud roads were bricked over and the streets illuminated by kerosene lamps. Tramways began to appear. The city was the third in the world to install public electric lighting. Public telephones appeared well ahead of most cities in Europe and North America. By the turn of the century, tree-lined parks and plazas and sumptuous buildings catering to a burgeoning bourgeoisie-libraries, museums, the Teatro Nacional, and grand neoclassical mansions and middle-class homes-graced the city. Architects, influenced by the Paris and Crystal Palace Expositions and aided by coffee income, were erecting great monuments and schools built of imported prefab metals. Homes and public buildings, too, adopted the in-vogue, French-inspired look of New Orleans and Martinique. The city became respectable!

Of course, the city had its slumlike suburbs of puertas ventanas, tiny workers' houses in which several families often lived side by side. Industrial zones rose on the periphery of the urban center. And isolated sections were populated by blacks who had defied segregationist laws and settled in the Meseta Central.

Modern Times
Still, as recently as the 1940s San Jose had only 70,000 residents - a mere tenth of the country's population. After WW II ended, however, the capital city began to mushroom, growing haphazardly, encroaching on neighboring villages such as Guadalupe and Tibas. Sadly, many of the city's finest buildings felt the blow of the demolition crane in postwar years. In their stead have come monstrous examples of modern architecture. Uncontrolled rapid growth in recent years has spread the city's tentacles farther a field until the suburban districts have begun to blur into the larger complex, and neighboring towns such as Heredia and Alajuela are threatened with being engulfed. At night the surrounding hills twinkle with the lights of suburban villages that are slowly being drawn into the city's fold.