The story
Tope Nacional San Jose in San José
Tracing to fundraising processions organised after an 1871 earthquake damaged San Jose's cathedral, the Tope Nacional now opens the capital's Festejos Populares each 26 December with around 5,000 riders and horses parading from Plaza Gonzalez Viquez to Calle 40. Horses trained to perform dance-like stepping patterns give the procession its distinctive visual character, continuing a tradition whose original fundraising purpose has long since been superseded.
El Tope Nacional traces its origins to the aftermath of an 1871 earthquake that badly damaged San Jose's Metropolitan Cathedral, when the Catholic Church called on nearby towns to organise a rotating schedule of local fairs specifically to raise reconstruction funds, with participating towns sending their finest horses and ox-drawn carts loaded with stone, wood and paint into a procession that converged on the capital.