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The Puerto Viejo area belongs to a wider Talamanca region with longstanding Bribri and Cabécar presence. Indigenous communities developed detailed knowledge of the forests, rivers and coastal ecosystems, and cultivated crops including cacao, maize, beans and cassava. Although Puerto Viejo itself later became associated with Afro-Caribbean settlement and tourism, the surrounding territory remains connected to Indigenous lands, languages, beliefs and political life. The Bribri and Cabécar peoples have preserved forms of community organisation and agricultural practice despite the pressures created by colonisation, land loss and commercial development. Visitors should understand the coast not as an empty wilderness discovered by outsiders, but as a landscape shaped by communities with deep and continuing relationships to Talamanca.

From the late nineteenth century, Afro-Caribbean migrants, particularly from Jamaica, settled along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. They brought English and Caribbean Creole linguistic influences, Protestant traditions, music, cooking and agricultural knowledge. Puerto Viejo grew within this coastal world of small settlements, maritime movement and exchange rather than as a Spanish colonial inland town. Cacao and other crops supported local livelihoods, while fishing and coastal trade connected communities along the shore. The Afro-Caribbean presence remains central to Puerto Viejo’s identity, visible in the food, music, surnames, architecture and cultural traditions of the region. Later migration from other parts of Costa Rica and abroad added further layers without erasing this foundational history.

Costa Rica’s Caribbean lowlands were transformed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by banana cultivation and the railway linking the Caribbean coast with the Central Valley. Large-scale production was concentrated most strongly around Limón and other plantation zones, but its effects reached smaller coastal communities through labour migration, transport networks and commercial connections. Disease, market changes and the social consequences of plantation agriculture repeatedly altered the regional economy. Puerto Viejo remained more modest than the principal banana centres, relying on mixed agriculture, fishing and coastal exchange. These economic shifts helped establish the roads, settlements and population movements that later made the southern Caribbean accessible to visitors.

For much of the twentieth century, Puerto Viejo was a relatively remote coastal settlement served by limited roads and local commerce. Improved road access gradually brought more residents, domestic visitors and international travellers, while surfing helped place the southern Caribbean on Costa Rica’s tourism map. Small guesthouses, restaurants and guiding businesses developed alongside existing homes and shops. Tourism created employment and new cultural exchange, but it also contributed to rising land values, development pressure and debates over environmental protection and access to the coast. The town visible today therefore reflects both continuity and change: a Caribbean community whose older traditions remain present within an increasingly international visitor economy.

The establishment and expansion of protected areas around the southern Caribbean changed how the landscape was managed and understood. Cahuita National Park, the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge and other conservation initiatives protect rainforest, wetlands, beaches and marine habitats, while also supporting research, guiding and nature-based tourism. Conservation has not removed questions concerning land rights, Indigenous sovereignty, public access or the balance between development and fragile ecosystems. Puerto Viejo’s contemporary identity is consequently shaped by several overlapping histories: Indigenous stewardship, Afro-Caribbean settlement, agricultural transformation, national conservation and international tourism. Its cultural life and environmental debates are as important to understanding the town as its beaches and wildlife.