Sarchí is a well known craft center in Costa Rica, having more than 200 shops and small factories that make wooden bowls, tableware, furniture, and souvenirs. The best-known items made here are elaborately painted oxcarts, traditionally used in the mountains to transport coffee to market.
Each region of Costa Rica had a unique oxcart design, with characteristic painted patterns on the cart’s wheels. Today, oxcarts still have largely been replaced by trucks, but the oxcarts still are used by some farmers and play a role in parades and religious celebrations.
The “Sarchí OxCart” is located in the city’s Central Park. It was designed and built in 2006 by the Alfaro Castro Hermanos factory, which we’ve previously feature on TravelGumbo. The idea behind making it was to put Sarchí’s name in the Guinness Book of Records, which it did.
This World Record cart is 2 stories high, 14 meters (about 45 feet) long, and weighs two tons. It is five times the size of a normal oxcart and is made of cedar, with four coats of paint and detailed colored pattern. Its construction and painting took 70 days.
