This statistic shows the biggest cities in Costa Rica in 2020. In 2020, approximately 1.45 million people lived in San José , making it the biggest city in Costa Rica.

In 2022, San José and Alajuela were the most populated provinces in Costa Rica, with over a million inhabitants each. The Central American country has a high concentration of the population in the urban area known as Central Valley.

According to a study that surveyed startup companies based in Central America, San José, the capital of Costa Rica, had the startup ecosystem with the best score in terms of size, quality, and business climate. Overall, San José's startup ecosystem was rated with 0.74 points, of which 0.52 were awarded in the area of business environment. Panama City received the second best startup ecosystem score, at a total of 0.41 points.

Latin American fertility study conducted between 1964-66. The seven cities included in the study are Bogota, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Caracas, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, and San Jose (Costa Rica). The three largest Latin American cities included were Buenos Aires, Mexico and Rio de Janeiro. Medium sized cities were represented by Bogota and Caracas. The smallest cities included were Panama City and San Jose. Individuals surveyed were women, 20-50 years of age and all marital statuses. These city studies were conducted from 1964-66 in each country by national institutions with the design and supervision of the U.N. Demographic Training Center, CELADE, in Santiago. The Community and Family Study Center of the University of Chicago standardized the codes and the Population Council organized them into the present format. Topics included urbanization, levels and trends of fertility, attitudes and opinions toward desired family size and family planning, use of contraceptives, attitudes toward their use, and means of communicating about them. Additional demographic, economic, social and psychological details were also gathered.

We analyze the performance of a prototype earthquake early warning system deployed at the National Seismological Network of Costa Rica in collaboration with the Swiss Seismological Service by presenting the real-time performance during six earthquakes (Mw 5.1-6.4) that took place during 2018 and 2019. We observe that, despite only limited efforts to optimize the existing network of 158 stations, for EEW purposes, the network density allows fast determination of source parameters using both the Virtual Seismologist and the Finite Fault Rupture Detector algorithms. Shallow earthquakes on or near-shore are routinely identified within 11–20 s of their occurrence. The warning times for the capital city of San Jose are of 43 s for epicenters located at 220 km, like for the Mw 6.4 Armuelles earthquake. On the other hand, during the time analyzed, the EEW system did not provide positive warning times for earthquakes at distances less than 40 km from San Jose. Even though large (Mw > 7) distant historical earthquakes have not caused heavy damage in San Jose, there is potential for developing an EEW system for Costa Rica, especially for the purposes of rapid earthquake notifications, disaster response management, and seismic risk mitigation.