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Costa Rica Guide

Limón Province and the Caribbean coast

Puerto Limón

To the rest of the country, PUERTO LIMÓN, more often simply called Limón, is Costa Rica's bête noire, a steamy port raddled with slum neighbourhoods, bad sanitation and drug-related crime. Many buildings, damaged during the 1991 earthquake (the epicentre was just south of Limón) lie skeletal and wrecked, still in the process of falling down. Curiously, however, with its washed-out, peeling oyster-and-lime hues, Limón can be almost pretty, in a sad kind of way, with the pseudo-beauty of all Caribbean "slums of empire", as St Lucian poet Derek Walcott put it.

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