Botos

The Botos, also called Votos and originally Bocto, were the leading Indigenous people of northern Costa Rica at the conquest, on the slopes of the Poas and Barva volcanoes and the plains of the San Carlos and Sarapiqui rivers toward Lake Nicaragua, with their chief town Cutris.

First contact with Spaniards came in 1525, Hernando de Soto reaching a village on the Pocosol River. Politically fragmented but skilled cacao growers, they traded along the San Juan and acknowledged Huetar kings as overlords for marriage ties and defence against the Nahua Nicarao. Their speech may have been Rama, a Chibchan tongue that Huetar fugitives who joined them around 1640 had to learn.

Conquest ended their autonomy: in 1569 Governor Perafan de Ribera granted them in encomienda to Aranjuez, and over the following century forced labour and resettlement dissolved their communities, leaving only the Laguna Botos name in Poas crater.