Costa Rican Art Museum
National art collection housed in the former La Sabana airport terminal, with a sculpture garden alongside.
The Costa Rican Art Museum occupies the terminal of La Sabana, the country's first international airport, a low Spanish colonial revival building of 1940 at the eastern edge of what is now the city's largest park. When flights moved to Alajuela, the building was handed over for cultural use and the museum opened there in 1978, charged with assembling and showing the national collection of modern and contemporary Costa Rican art.
The holdings run to several thousand works from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, including paintings by Teodorico Quirós and Francisco Amighetti and sculpture by Francisco Zúñiga and Juan Rafael Chacón. On the upper floor the Salón Dorado is lined with a bronze and stucco relief by the French-born artist Louis Féron, narrating Costa Rican history. Outside, a sculpture garden in the park surrounds the building, and admission is free.
Highlights
- Salón Dorado: bronze and stucco relief mural by Louis Féron
- Collection of Costa Rican painting and sculpture from the 1850s onwards
- Housed in the 1940 terminal of the country's first international airport
- Open-air sculpture garden in Parque La Sabana
