Q COSTARICA — The new mayor of San José is standing firm that the “Tope”, the year-end annual horse parade, will not return to the capital during his administration. The young mayor stated, “An activity where the nobility exhibited their wealth to people who did not have access.”
The mayor addressed the issue through a video on his social networks, before Gilberto Santa Rosa’s free concert in La Sabana, an activity that, according to Miranda, strengthens citizen access to culture.
“It is a time to enjoy as a family, to enjoy our traditions, new and old, and also change some. We have changed traditions such as the tope, which is a rather outdated activity,” he said in the video.
“It is an activity from times past where the nobility exhibited their wealth in front of people who did not have access to them. We are offering other options to people, other traditions that are more in line with the idiosyncrasy of our country, for example, having access to culture and leisure as part of a public government policy,” he added.
In 2024, Miranda justified the decision due to the high cost of carrying out these types of events.
“The Tope has become an event that produces a million-dollar deficit for the municipal coffers. For this and other reasons, I have made the decision not to carry out this activity. We will seek to redirect the resources previously allocated to this activity toward community and infrastructure works that are necessary in our neighborhoods,” he published on the social network X (formerly Twitter) at that time.
Miranda, a Costa Rican historian and politician, and the younger mayor of San José, taking office in May 2024 at the age of 34, has been criticized for eliminating the Tope and in the name of modernizing the city.
“There are public decisions that are announced as gestures of modernity, but that in reality reveal a fragile—if not superficial—understanding of the social history of the country or region that is governed,” writes Ricardo Salas in an opinion piece published at El Observador.
“The National Tope was never simply a horse parade. For decades it functioned as a civic ritual: a space where the city reunited, even if only symbolically, with the rural country from which much of its identity comes. Describing it as an “outdated” or “elitist” practice means projecting onto Costa Rican history categories that are foreign to it,” writes Salas.
The Tope, until last year, had been held for decades on December 26 in the streets of the capital.