The Teatro Nacional

The story is that a celebrated soprano toured Central America in the 1890s and skipped Costa Rica because there was nowhere suitable to sing, and the coffee barons, humiliated, taxed their own exports to build a theatre. Whether or not that is quite how it went, the tax was real and the building opened in 1897: an Italianate opera house with a marble staircase, a foyer of gilt and mirrors, a ceiling painted with allegories, and the famous canvas of coffee and banana harvesting that once appeared on the five-colón note, painted by an Italian who had never seen either crop and got the details wrong.

What you actually see

• The foyer - marble, gilt and mirrors, and the painted ceiling.
• The harvest painting - the coffee and banana canvas from the banknote.
• The auditorium - horseshoe tiers under a painted dome.
• A performance - the National Symphony plays here through the season.

When to go

Year-round. Guided tours run through the day at set times; the National Symphony season runs roughly March to November with concerts most weeks. Buying a cheap seat for a concert is the best way to see the auditorium in use.

Honest expectations

The tour is short and the building small by European opera house standards; forty-five minutes covers it. The famous harvest painting is a nineteenth-century idealisation with obvious errors, which the guides point out. The plaza outside is a hard-sell area for touts and the surrounding streets need ordinary caution.

Nearby

The gold museum is under the plaza outside; the Mercado Central is ten minutes west.