Gold Museum

This will be my last post about my trip to Panama and Costa Rica. On our last full day in Costa Rica, one of our stops was the gold museum in San Jose. It's much more than a museum dedicated to gold, but also has fine art , sculpture and more. But we only went to the bottom floor , which was devoted to precolumbian gold jewelry and artifacts.

The solid objects were made in wax molds and are a mixture of gold and copper. I was surprised that these shots came out as good as they did, shot through the glass cases.


The flat disks were hammered and made of solid gold.


There were many items of stylized frogs, lizards and other things in nature common to the area.


The picture of this shaman is a bit fuzzy, but I wanted to show the similarity to the one below.

I really like jewelry and usually buy something from countries I visit, if there is a distinctive style. The museum had a great gift shop with reproductions of things seen in the museum. I bought this little shaman pendant. He's about 1 1/2 inches high and his head and shoulders are articulated.