Clyde

Malta - 15-Mar-13 -

Nothing much to deserve a WHS status. No universal value and not much to see either

Esteban Cervantes Jiménez

Costa Rica - 18-Jun-11 -

Equally to the National Theater, the National Monuement, located in the National Park in San Jose, represents the ideals of the liberal era, in this case nationalism. The monument was built to conmemorate the 1856-1857 National Campaign against the filibusters that invaded Nicaragua at that time and were planning to establish a puppet slave republic in Central America according to ideas prevailing at the time.

It was also built to ornate the park in front of the railway station that connected the city and the Central Valley to the Caribbean coast and thus allowed trade with the world at the time. It was the point of entrance to San Jose and was located in the area of San Jose where also the finest buildings and where the rich mainly settled, all in the northeastern side of the city.

As what to the monument concerns, it was encharged to the french sculptor Louis Carrier Belleuse, disciple of Rodin and even it is argued that the master participated in some of the parts of the monument. It was shipped to Limon port, transported to San Jose and assembled, its inauguration was celebrated in 1895 with the greatest honors to the heroes that parcipated in the campaign. It is made up of seven figures and a pedestal, five of them representing the five central american republics of the time, another is the invader being expelled and the last depicts a dead soldier from the costarrican army.

Finally and I have said in other reviews, it does not have definitively value for a WHS proclamation, but its importance in national terms is obvious and deserves to be kept for the future generations.