Costa Rica was the first Central American country to establish the coffee industry. The first plantations began around 1810 and a few decades later, the first recorded exports to Panama and then to Chile and England took place. Coffee was the crop that linked the country with the foreign market and that allowed the revitalization of its economy, highly dependent on the fluctuations of coffee prices on the international maket. Coffee was one of the most important creators of landscape which also caused a major impact on the Costa Rican landscape itself.
This article seeks an approach to the landscape impact caused by the commercial expansion of coffee
cultivation in the Depresión Tectónica Central (Central Valley) of Costa Rica between 1820 and 1900. The investigation’s point of departure is the theoretical proposal of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LUCC).