Port Limon, in latitude 10° north and longitude 83° 3′ 13″ west from Greenwich, is the only port of entry of Costa Rica on the Caribbean Sea. The first house was built there in 1871. The harbor faces the south, and is formed by a little peninsula on which Limon is situated. It is behind a narrow coral reef. The site, which now has perhaps 3500 to 4000 population, is being raised with earth about four feet, and its port will become one of the smoothest of the Caribbean Sea. A small island, called Uvita, lies east at a distance of 3660 feet from the town. Port Limon has a wooden pier 930 feet long, accommodating two sea-going ships, but an iron pier is about to replace it, which will berth four large ones of deep draught. The Talamanca coast lying south of Limon is low, flat and swampy, except where it is broken by hills. The little River Banana is the first one met with going south, and its valleys produce large quantities of timber and bananas. Next comes the Estrella, also a short stream; then follows the Teliri, called in its lower course the Sicsola. It is the largest stream in Costa Rica south of Port Limon. It runs along the southern base of the great eastern mountains of the Talamanca range, through a spacious, undulating, wooded valley of 100 to 150 square miles area, partly low grounds in some places dry and in others swampy. It has several branches, like the Uren coming from the slopes of the Pico Blanco, the Supurio and others. At the entry of the high valleys of the Teliri and Coen rivers, the pyramid-like mountains of Nefomin and Nenfiobete appear, at the foot of which the interior plain of Talamanca, fifteen kilometers in length and eight kilometers in width, extends from southwest to northeast, and so uniformly that the water courses run indifferently and frequently change their beds. Southward of Sicsola is the Tilorio or Changuinola, which makes a turbulent way to the sea from the Talamanca mountains. Along its lower margin mud flats spread to a great width, and, from its mouth towards the northwest, cover a region which surrounds also the lagoon of Sansan, and extends up the rivers Zhorquin and Sicsola. Behind the muddy zone the lands rise rapidly into hills, which in a few miles reach an altitude of several thousand feet, at times intermingling with the Cordillera. Along the entire sea margin of Talamanca runs a narrow sand-belt of firm land, at times not a hundred feet wide, like that described between the Matina and San Juan rivers. Within this sand-belt are long, narrow, deep lagoons filled with half-stagnant water from the mud flats. These lagoons usually open into the rivers which descend from the mountains. Between the Sicsola and the Tilorio lies the already mentioned, crooked and deep lagoon called the Laguna de Sansan.