In Osa history travels by bicycle

Author: Carlos Morales Barrantes

It is an exhibition with identity, designed by and for the inhabitants of the Osa Canton. It is a temporary exhibition “In Osa history travels by bicycle,” which you can admire at the Finca 6 Museum site, in Palmar Sur.

There, visitors will be able to take a tour through the Osa canton’s history through the stories of five people who preserve their old bicycles. We seek to value bicycles’ social and cultural use during the Canton of Osa’s banana occupation period.

 Through a series of attractive museum resources, we hope that visitors can be transported to the banana era, to its cobbled streets and the banana plantations through which people traveled on their bicycles.

The theme focuses on the bicycles’ social value  in the banana context, and how this has transcended over time in the Canton. We seek to make the old bicycle and its social use visible as a means of heritage value.  As a vehicle, it carries stories and stories associated with people with life stories, bearers of a vast social and cultural heritage that allows us to understand the reality and development. We want to rescue this object’s patrimonial and social values and traditions and remember those who are carriers of knowledge and stories.

The cultural legacy of the bicycle in Canton

In the Canton of Osa, bicycles are part of the heritage legacy of the banana period. A culture has been existing around this means of transport. Its practical and social use has evolved by these realities, the times, the contexts, and the population’s needs.

In this sense, the Museum undertook the task of gathering information to reconstruct a fragment of history in the Osa canton from the knowledge, stories, and stories of five people who live in the Canton and who lived part of their lives in the social and cultural context during the banana occupation period.

Many of the banana workers still have their old bicycles. Some of them have been modified, contemporary elements added, and some original systems replaced them, the rod brakes, the handlebars, and the saddles to adapt them to the conditions of the environment and the national market of spare parts.

The Finca 6 Site Museum Visitor Center is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 8 am to 2 pm. For now, temporarily, admission is free. It is located 8 km from the Palmar Sur park, on the road to Sierpe.

In addition to the temporary exhibition “In Osa, history travels by bicycle”, you can visit the permanent exhibition “Diquís, a unique region” and the archaeological site with stone spheres.

Historical background: The Costa Rican Banana Company reached a commercial agreement with the government of President González Flores (1914-1917) to create an enclave in the southern lands. This agreement allowed the exploitation for 100 years of the plains of Parrita, Palmar, Piedras Blancas; Coto y Laurel for the planting of a monoculture called the green gold: the banana.