John Lennon Statue in San José, Costa Rica (Plaza de las Artes)

The John Lennon statue in San José, Costa Rica, is a bronze copy of Cuban sculptor José Ramón Villa Soberón's seated Lennon in Havana. It sits on a bench in Plaza de las Artes on Calle 9, facing La Soledad church. The city unveiled it on 25 November 2011, on the same square where a crowd burned Beatles records in 1966.

Plaza de las Artes, not "Plaza Artigas"

Some travel listings put this statue in "Plaza Artigas." No Costa Rican source uses that name. Local press and OpenStreetMap call the square Plaza de las Artes. It used to be known as the Explanada de La Soledad, after the church it faces, and it sits on Calle 9, the old Paseo de los Estudiantes. That stretch of Calle 9 is now pedestrianized and branded Barrio Chino (Chinatown); the plaza is about 100 m south of the Chinatown gate. In Spanish the statue is usually called the Estatua de John Lennon, Plaza de las Artes, frente a la Iglesia de La Soledad.

This is San José, Costa Rica, not San Jose, California. You may also see 28 November 2011 given as the unveiling date. That was the day The Tico Times published its report. The statue itself was unveiled on Friday, 25 November.

The night of the record burning, 9 August 1966

The plaza's history with the Beatles goes back 45 years before the statue. At 7 pm on Tuesday, 9 August 1966, a crowd, mostly teenagers, gathered on the Explanada de La Soledad to burn Beatles records, sleeves and photos. Radio presenters Manuel Fresno and Rafael Rojas had called for the protest, along with Dora Amalia Maduro, president of a Beatles fan club. She told reporters that the girls were Christians first and Beatles fans second. Sources disagree on Fresno's station: La Nación's 2025 piece says he worked at La Voz de América, while TicoSound names Radio Athenea Juvenil as the station where both men were presenters.

The fire burned on an old tire soaked in petrol. Near life-size effigies of the four Beatles were set alight on the church steps, Lennon's first. Some people in the crowd tried to pull records back out of the flames, and Rojas, who had helped call the protest, was one of them. Later that night, people with no connection to the protest attacked shops nearby, and police cleared the plaza with tear gas.

Fresno's 2025 explanation: a ratings fight

In July 2025 Manuel Fresno gave La Nación his own account of why it happened. He said he had supported the anti-Beatles campaign mainly to win listeners from a rival station that played English-language music. By his telling, the burning started as a move in a local radio competition.

How the statue ended up facing La Soledad

The idea came from Meet The Beatles, a Costa Rican Beatles fan club run by Mauricio Vargas and Martín Rodríguez. The Municipality of San José, then led by mayor Johnny Araya, paid for it. Reports from 2011 put the cost at ₡7 million, about US$14,000. A 2017 article in La Teja gave a figure of about ₡9 million, which may include later costs, though no source confirms that.

The city first announced the plaza in front of the Teatro Nacional. People on social media objected that the plaza already honors Juan Mora Fernández, Costa Rica's first head of state, whose statue stands there. Araya moved the project to the square outside La Soledad. According to La Nación, Melvin Sáenz pointed to the 1966 burning as a reason Lennon belonged on that square.

Hundreds of people came to the unveiling, where Tico Beatles cover bands played alongside brass players from the San José symphony orchestra. There were objections too. Critics asked why the city was honoring a foreigner, made by a foreign artist, instead of a Costa Rican, and some churchgoers were uneasy about the location. By coincidence, La Soledad had been declared national architectural heritage on 8 December 1999, the anniversary of Lennon's death.

The statue's title is also unsettled. The Tico Times and TicoSound call it "Imagine all the people living life in peace." Other reports use "Dicen que soy un soñador, pero no soy el único," which is the title of the Havana original. The San José copy may have been given its own title, but no source says so directly.

On the bench: what's there and what's missing

The statue copies Villa Soberón's design from John Lennon Park in Havana. Lennon sits at one end of a metal bench with his legs crossed, as if listening to people walking past. The empty half of the bench is where visitors sit for photos. He doesn't face the church door: one eyewitness at the unveiling wrote that he is turned almost away from La Soledad. The church steps, where the effigies burned in 1966, still make a good backdrop.

He also has no round glasses. Every sourced report since 2011 describes the statue without them, though the reports disagree on why. The Costa Rica Star, citing a La Nación blogger, reported that the municipality removed the fragile glasses on 6 December 2011 and kept them. TicoSound says they were stolen twice. An eyewitness says they were already gone on the night of the unveiling. No recent source confirms how the statue looks now.

The statue has been vandalized too. On 27 February 2017 someone sprayed paint on the eyes, fingernails and shirt buttons. Within a week of the city's clean-up, obscene marker drawings appeared, and La Teja reported that some paint was still visible after cleaning.

A bronze of the tango singer Carlos Gardel stands in the same small plaza, roughly 35 m from Lennon going by OpenStreetMap coordinates, so the square has two statues of foreign musicians. Villa Soberón also made a different Lennon, a walking figure, which now stands in Tampa. For other statues, see the memorials list or the map.