Located in the Central Mountain Range, not far from Costa Rica’s capital city of San Jóse, the town of Sarchí is the center of Costa Rica’s painted oxcart industry.
According to legend, around 1910 a farmer was suddenly inspired to spruce up the appearance of his oxcart. He painted the wheels with multi-colored designs. Others copied his designs and oxcart painting became a uniquely Costa Rican art form. At one time each district in the country had its own special design, and people could tell by looking at an oxcart what region it came from.
Until about thirty years ago, oxcarts were the principal means of transporting coffee beans and other agricultural products to market. Today some farmers still rely on this traditional method of transporting their goods. The father of former president Oscar Arias Sánchez made his fortune hauling coffee in oxcarts to the port of Puntarenas.
Tapirs are rather strange, primitive creatures. They are big animals—measuring about six to eight feet between their short little trunk and their stubby little tail, and weighing up to 700 pounds. Unlike elephants, who pick up food with their trunks, the tapirs move their trunks aside and browse like horses. Tapirs are the only animals native to the Americas which have four toes on their front feet and three toes on their hind feet.
Hanging upside-down from the branches of trees in Costa Rica’s lush rain forests, sleep the two and three-toed sloths. The Spanish word for sloth is perezoso, meaning “lazy”, and sloths, who sleep around eighteen hours a day, live up to their reputation.
Some say the it was the ancient Greeks, some argue that it was indigenous Americans like the Mayans of the 
