DailyGeo › Atlas › Capitals of the world

Capitals of the world

San José, capital of Costa Rica: facts and figures

Updated 28 August 2026 · 3 min read · DailyGeo team

Key figures

Climate through the year

San José averages 19.8 °C from December to February and 20.1 °C from June to August. October is the coldest month of the year and April the warmest, and the city receives 3,055 mm of precipitation in an average year.

What makes it stand out

• Elevation: 3rd highest capital in North America (1,161 m).
• Rainfall: wettest capital in North America (3,055 mm).
• Latitude: 2nd southernmost capital in North America (9.93°).
• Prices: priciest capital for a Big Mac in North America ($7.00).

Nearest capitals

Distances are great-circle distances between city centres, which is what the Capitals game measures when it tells you how far a guess was from the answer. Managua is the closest capital to San José.

How to remember it

Reading a figure once rarely fixes it in memory. Attach San José to a place and a number you already know: it is 338 km from Managua, and it is the 93rd largest capital in the atlas. Then practise retrieving it. DailyGeo Capitals gives you one mystery capital a day with distance, direction, language and population clues, the memorising method explains the review schedule, and the capitals index lists all 172.

To see how Costa Rica compares with every other country on figures like these, the most expensive Big Mac index ranks them on geopolitix, a country-ranking game by the same maker as DailyGeo.

Sources

• City population and coordinates: DailyGeo's own game data, the same figures the Capitals game plays with. Population follows the urban area rather than the commune, which is why no density is quoted.
• Temperature and rainfall: ten-year means (2015 to 2024) computed from ERA5 reanalysis, retrieved through Open-Meteo. Hersbach, H., et al. (2020). The ERA5 global reanalysis. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.
• Elevation: terrain height at the city's coordinates in the Copernicus DEM, read through Open-Meteo rather than taken from a curated claim.
• Time zone: resolved from the same coordinates.
• Country figures: the World Bank, latest reported year for each series: Country GDP, GDP per capita, Country population, Life expectancy, Internet users.
• Big Mac price: The Economist's Big Mac index, from its published dataset. The index covers about 55 economies, so most capitals here have no figure.
• Founding date: Wikidata, earliest recorded founding claim.
• This capital elsewhere: Wikipedia, UNdata, Wikidata.
• Method and limits: How this data was collected explains how each figure was collected and what it does not cover.

The short answer

Keep learning

• Managua, capital of Nicaragua: facts and figures

  Managua is the capital of Nicaragua: 1,050,000 residents, 174 m above sea level, 26.5 °C from December to February and 26.6 °C from June to August.

• Panama City, capital of Panama: facts and figures

  Panama City is the capital of Panama: 1,900,000 residents, 13 m above sea level, 26.6 °C from December to February and 26.3 °C from June to August.

• Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras: facts and figures

  Tegucigalpa is the capital of Honduras: 1,400,000 residents, 1,003 m above sea level, 20.3 °C from December to February and 22.2 °C from June to August.

• Capitals of the world: the full list by continent

  Every capital in DailyGeo's atlas, grouped by continent, with population, elevation and winter and summer temperatures, each linking to its own data page.