This week in Costa Rica, the president accused four Constitutional Chamber justices of staging a coup, a Costa Rican diplomat took the lead in the race to run the United Nations, and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims walked to Cartago for La Negrita. Here are seven stories worth catching up on if you live in, visit or follow Costa Rica

President Laura Fernández accused four justices of the Constitutional Chamber of staging a coup d’état on Friday and announced that the governing-party legislative bench will file a criminal complaint against them on Monday.

The dispute centers on a ruling that provisionally extended the appointments of the court’s substitute justices. The announcement was delivered in a video recorded at Casa Presidencial.

The confrontation is the sharpest between the Executive Branch and the Judiciary in years, and it lands in the middle of an election cycle.

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Costa Rican diplomat Rebeca Grynspan emerged as the early frontrunner to become the next Secretary-General after the first informal vote by the U.N. Security Council. She received 10 “encourage” votes, one “discourage” vote and four expressing no opinion from the council’s 15 members — the strongest showing in the field. The straw poll is not binding, but it sets the terms of the race.

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A failure in judicial branch systems forced immigration officers at Juan Santamaría to process travelers by hand on Saturday. One flight was cancelled and 36 passengers missed a JetBlue departure. It was the second outage of its kind at the airport, and if you are flying out of San José in the coming weeks, the practical lesson is to build in more time than the airline tells you to.

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OVSICORI-UNA revised Friday night’s Cartago earthquake to magnitude 5.0 at a depth of 8 kilometers (5 miles) near Orosi. Monitors counted 60 aftershocks between 8:16 p.m. Friday and 5:00 a.m. Saturday. The shaking was felt across the Central Valley in the middle of Romería weekend, when road traffic and pilgrim numbers were at their highest.

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Costa Rica received 214,518 visitors by air in June, a 1.2% drop from the 217,120 recorded in the same month last year. It was the first negative month after eight consecutive months of growth, and the industry is now bracing for a harder second half of 2026.

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A shell picked up on a beach walk, a piece of coral, a seed pod, a carved trinket from a roadside stand — any of them can stop you at the airport, and in some cases put your name into a criminal file before you fly home. Authorities have launched a public campaign ahead of the high season. The safest rule is simple: leave it where you found it.

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The Banco Central de Costa Rica has cut its 2026 growth forecast to 3.4%, pointing to weaker exports, slower household demand and a climate shock already weighing on output. The warning that matters for anyone living here is what comes next: a severe El Niño could push up the cost of food and electricity before the year is out, with agriculture and hydroelectric generation both exposed.

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Today is the day the walking stops. August 2 is the feast of the Virgen de los Ángeles, the small dark stone image Costa Ricans call La Negrita, and it closes the pilgrimage that has been filling the shoulder of every road into Cartago for the past week. Hundreds of thousands walked it this year, through rain and wind from Tropical Wave 27, under one of the largest annual security and emergency operations.

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