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Costa Rica became a major Central American coffee exporter. After independence in 1821, settlers in the central highlands found that the volcanic soils around San Jose, Heredia, Alajuela, and Cartago suited the crop, and the state gave land and tax privileges to anyone who would plant it. Shipments to London began in the 1840s, and coffee soon paid for roads, schools, and public buildings. Because colonial Costa Rica had been poor and thinly populated, with few great estates, coffee wealth spread more widely among small and medium farmers than elsewhere in the isthmus, though processors and exporters captured the largest profits.
The liberal state took shape under General Tomas Guardia, who seized power in 1870 and dominated politics until his death in 1882. His governments wrote the constitution of 1871, curbed the church, promoted education, and signed a contract with the American railroad builder Minor Keith to link the highlands to the Caribbean. The Atlantic railway, finished in 1890, placed a heavy burden on public finances but carried coffee to Europe, and the lands granted to Keith along the line became the base of a banana industry that later fed into the United Fruit Company. In 1889 the government of Bernardo Soto tried to impose his successor, but public protests forced it to respect the vote, an event Costa Ricans remember as the birth of their democracy.
Coffee society rested on the work of the whole country. Each harvest, families from the highlands picked the crop, and the famous painted oxcarts carried the beans down to the Pacific port of Puntarenas. Processors in San Jose, the beneficios, cleaned and graded the coffee and advanced credit, wielding great power over small growers. Public investment in primary education was an important part of the liberal state, although access remained unequal.
The system was not immune to crisis. Falling coffee prices after 1900 strained the treasury, and in 1917 the war minister Federico Tinoco seized power in a military coup. Popular opposition and American non-recognition forced him out in 1919, and constitutional rule returned with the election of Julio Acosta in 1920. By 1924 coffee exports and constitutional politics had become central to Costa Rican public life, though the banana enclave on the Atlantic coast, run by a foreign company with its own labor force, stood apart from the highland society that coffee had built.
Wikipedia - Coffee production in Costa Rica
HAHR book review - Carolyn Hall, Coffee and Costa Rican Development
Cambridge - Formation of the Coffee Estate in Costa Rica