Note 8 — Chapter XIV · THE RICH COAST

In the latter part of the eighteenth century Matina was a port of some importance and the centre of the largest and best cacaotales—cacao haciendas—in Costa Rica, but owing to the frequent incursions of pirates and Mosquito Indians, this fertile territory had to be evacuated. There was also another reason for abandoning it and that was the hot, enervating, pernicious atmosphere, and the torrential rains, which were the causes of malaria and malignant fevers from which the district was never exempt. So bad was the reputation of the Matina valley in this respect that people, as the Costa Rican writer, Don Ricardo F. Guardia, informs us in his Cuentos Ticos, “used to confess and make their wills when they went to Matina, to the famous Matina which inspires fear in men and madness in mules,8 as they used to say in those days when men were braver and mules better.”—