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Good Afternoon from San José
The airport switched on automated immigration gates this week. If you carry a Costa Rican biometric passport, you can now clear in about twenty seconds without speaking to anyone. If you are a tourist or a foreign resident, you are still in the regular line — for now.
Also this week: the main road between the Central Valley and the Pacific is shut for up to two months, the dollar set another record low against the colón, and El Niño is now strong enough that forecasters expect it to outlast the entire dry season.
This Week By the Numbers
17 to 22 — seconds it takes to clear immigration at one of the new biometric gates
2 months — how long Route 1 at Cambronero could stay closed
₡447.93 — the dollar’s record low close on Monex, down nearly 10% since January
5,146 — vehicles stolen in Costa Rica in 2025, the highest figure of the decade
2.5°C (4.5°F) — how far above normal the tropical Pacific ran in August, the warmest in 38 years of records
205 — years of independence Costa Rica marks on Tuesday
The Top Story
The gate reads the chip in your passport, then checks your face. / The Tico Times
Juan Santamaría now has automated immigration gates, and getting through one takes between 17 and 22 seconds. You set your passport on the reader, look at the camera, and wait for the light. Green means the gate opens and you walk. If something does not match, an officer handles you in person.
The catch is who qualifies. For now the gates work only for Costa Rican citizens over 18 carrying a valid biometric passport. Tourists, foreign residents, and Ticos traveling on an older passport all stay in the regular line.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. The chip inside a biometric passport already carries the facial data the machine compares against, so there is no enrollment step and no advance registration.
Foreigners are excluded because of how the system was built rather than because of policy. The gate can only wave you through if it reads a chip it trusts and matches it to a face it already holds, and it was designed around the Costa Rican passport first. Migración says a second stage that would open the gates to other nationalities is under evaluation. Aeris started with four gates in arrivals and two in departures, and will add more as it learns how travelers use them.
More News
Route 27 is the only detour heavy vehicles should be using. / The Tico Times
If your drive west runs through Cambronero, plan on another route for a while. A tractor-trailer struck the temporary bridge on Route 1 on the night of September 7, and the damage is bad enough that the structure cannot be repaired in place. It has to come out and a new one has to go in. Officials estimate up to two months.
Which detour you take depends on what you drive. Route 27, the toll road between San José and Caldera, handles everything including buses and tractor-trailers, so expect it busier than usual in both directions and budget extra time even outside rush hour. Route 3 over Monte del Aguacate works for cars, pickups and small trucks only. The switchbacks are too tight to swing a trailer, and one stuck truck closes the road for everyone behind it.
Light vehicles have a third option on the cantonal road between Río Jesús and Piedra Blanca. It is narrow and local, so treat it as a way to skip a queue rather than a highway substitute, and check conditions before trying it in heavy rain. The replacement bridge is priced at close to ₡300 million, roughly $661,000.
A very strong El Niño points to a drier than usual Pacific slope. / The Tico Times
El Niño has reached very strong intensity, and forecasters now expect it to stay in place until June 2027. That covers the whole of the coming dry season and the start of the next rainy one.
Sea surface temperature in the Pacific’s Niño 3.4 region ran about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal through August, warmer than the 1997 and 2015 events forecasters reach for when describing a severe El Niño. Daniel Poleo of the National Meteorological Institute said the readings are the highest in 38 years of records.
Back in May the institute expected something weaker and shorter that would fade early in 2027. The water warmed faster than that, and more heat is still sitting below the surface. El Niño usually peaks toward the end of the year, so these numbers are probably not the top.
Vehicle theft climbed while nearly every other property crime fell. / The Tico Times
If you own a car here, it is more likely to be stolen now than at any point in the past ten years. The Organismo de Investigación Judicial recorded 5,146 vehicle thefts in 2025, the highest annual figure of the decade and 20% above 2016.
What makes the number worth attention is everything around it. Muggings, larcenies, break-ins at homes and businesses, and thefts of items from inside parked cars all trended down over the same ten years. Vehicle theft went the other way, climbing every year from 2021 through 2025.
Part of that is arithmetic, since Costa Rica ended 2025 with 2,087,356 insured vehicles, 9.1% more than a year earlier. But specialists whose analysis accompanied the OIJ data point to a change in the crime itself. Taking a car is now a supply chain rather than a one-person job — someone steals it, someone else strips it, and intermediaries move the parts to workshops and buyers. The car is worth more in pieces than whole.
Simultaneous raids were carried out in Limón province. / The Tico Times
An employee of the Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería was arrested on suspicion of manipulating official records to push through a DIMEX residency renewal. The agency said its Policía Profesional de Migración detained the woman, a Costa Rican national surnamed Blandón Reyes, and carried out simultaneous raids at the Atlantic regional office where she worked and at her home.
According to Migración, the investigation indicates she used the functions assigned to her post to enter false data into institutional systems, including documents relating to a criminal background record, in order to complete the renewal for a Nicaraguan woman surnamed White Rankin. Authorities allege White Rankin is in a relationship with a man they identify as one of the leaders of the organization known as “La H,” which the agency links to drug trafficking and a series of homicides in Limón.
Blandón Reyes was transferred to the Ministerio Público at the Second Judicial Circuit in San José, where prosecutors will determine her legal status. No charges had been announced, and she has not been convicted of any offense.
Foreign buyers hold the same ownership rights as citizens, with one exception. / The Tico Times
You can buy titled property here with nothing more than a valid passport. No residency, no visa, no local partner, no minimum purchase. The title registers in your name at the Registro Nacional with full rights of use and disposal. The real exception is the coast, where the maritime zone works on different rules.
Two things changed the math this year. The tax incentives attached to Law 9996, which drew thousands of investors and retirees here after the pandemic, expired on July 14. And the colón is at its strongest level in the history of the Central Bank’s published series, which quietly raises what every dollar-funded purchase costs on the ground.
The parts that catch buyers out are the unglamorous ones — the registry search that turns up a lien nobody disclosed, the luxury home tax that arrives in January on a house the owner never thought of as luxurious, and the water letter that decides whether a lot can be built on at all.
Quick Hits
Independence Day is Tuesday and it does not move. The Labor Ministry confirmed the holiday stays on September 15, so Monday is a normal workday. Torch relay over the weekend, lantern parades Monday night, school parades Tuesday, and rain on and off throughout.
Monteverde is drying out even though the rain keeps falling. Scientists say the issue is not annual rainfall but how long dry spells run and how often cloud and mist actually touch the forest.
Pacific water is running up to 2°C (3.6°F) above normal. A station at Playa Herradura logged 32.6°C (90.7°F) in August against an average of 29.4°C (84.9°F). El Niño explains part of it, not all of it.
Nurse sharks are wearing cameras in Santa Rosa National Park. UCR researchers fitted them in Bahía Santa Elena, and the footage is undoing the long-held idea that the species barely moves.
Crabs have been found riding sea snakes off the Pacific coast. It is the first record of its kind in the literature, traced to a 2012 expedition when a crab dropped off the first snake pulled from the water.
Snoop Dogg plays Costa Rica for the first time on December 3. Centro de Eventos Pedregal in Belén, 18 and over, with more than 38,000 tickets going on sale through Publitickets. Prices not yet announced.
There are 180,220 fewer young children than a decade ago. INEC counts 794,618 children aged 0 to 12 this year, down 18.5% since 2016, with a steeper drop projected by 2036.
In defense of Tico time. Thirty-five years in, our columnist argues the phrase was coined by an impatient gringo and that the clock was never really the point.
Spotlight
₡447.93 on Monex, the lowest since the series began in 2007. / The Tico Times
The dollar closed at ₡447.93 on the Monex market, the lowest level since the Central Bank began the current historical series in December 2007. It broke a record that had been set the day before, at ₡448.17.
If your income arrives in dollars, the arithmetic is unforgiving. Exchanging $2,000 near ₡448 gets you about ₡896,000. On January 2, at the year’s opening rate of ₡497.07, the same $2,000 came to roughly ₡994,000. That is close to ₡100,000 of difference before any bank spread, and a decline of nearly 10% in nine months.
The Central Bank reference rates for September 11 were ₡444.22 to buy and ₡450.06 to sell, with individual banks and exchange houses varying from there. The same strength that trims a pension also squeezes hotels and tour operators, who take payment in dollars and pay their staff in colones.
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