San Vito de Coto Brus

San Vito (Spanish pronunciation: [san bito]), originally named San Vito de Java, is the capital of the Coto Brus district of Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica. It is located about 271 kilometres (168 mi) southeast of the capital San José, and close to the Panama border.

The city is located on a high plateau with very irregular topography, at an altitude of 996 metres (3,268 ft) above sea level in the foothills of the Talamanca Mountain Range. The narrow and fast-flowing Java River traverses the outskirts of San Vito from northeast to southeast.

San Vito was founded in 1952, since when it has become an important centre in Costa Rica’s Brunca region.

The area of the district is 14,237 square kilometres (5,497 sq mi), with an estimated population of 14,839 inhabitants as of 2011. Of these, around 5,000 live in the city.

San Vito de Java was the result of a process of foreign agricultural colonisation organised by the state of Costa Rica. Its two goals were to populate the country with foreign settlers, and to establish settlements in outlying areas. San Vito was founded by settlers from Europe, in particular Italy.

In 1952, in the midst of the post-war socio-economic crisis in Europe, the two brothers Vito Giulio Cesar and Ugo Sansonetti organised a group of Italian pioneers from forty different places, from Trieste to Taranto, and including a handful from Istria and Dalmatia.

This Italian immigration is a typical example of directed agricultural colonisation, similar in many ways to the process in other places in Latin America. The European immigrants were helped by the Comité Intergubernamental para las Migraciones Europeas (CIME), (Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration).

Vito Sansonetti (1916-1999), a seaman by profession, was the founder of the colonising company which he named Sociedad Italiana de Colonización Agrícola (SICA), (Italian Agricultural Colonisation Society), and was in charge of negotiations with the Costa Rican authorities represented by the Instituto de Tierras y Colonización (ITCO) (Institute of Land and Colonisation). His brother, lawyer Ugo Sansonetti, lived in San Vito and acted as the leader and agent of the company in the region.

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