On a small farm in Nicoya, a group of siblings — all of them now older adults — had spent their entire lives growing corn, plantains, and fruit trees, raising cattle, and living in the four houses they had built on that same land decades earlier. None of them held a registered title. For the family, that land was simply “the family farm,” managed informally between relatives for generations.
The story behind that informality was, at its core, a family misunderstanding. Years earlier, the siblings’ mother signed a document believing she was only mortgaging the property to help one of her sons. In reality, that document transferred the bare legal title to him, leaving her with only a usufruct: the right to use and enjoy the land, not to own it. When she realized this years later, rather than fight with her son, she chose to pass that usufruct on to the children who needed it most, believing that, in doing so, she was protecting them. For the next ten years, nothing changed on the ground: the family lived together in harmony, working the land for their own subsistence.
The balance broke in 2020. The nephews — children of the brother who had once received the bare title — informed the family that they were now the registered owners of the farm, and that they were only willing to recognize a small share for three of the sisters. The rest of the siblings, many of them elderly and having never known any other home or livelihood, were left out.
After a lifetime spent farming and living on that land for their own subsistence, our clients faced the real possibility of losing everything, based on a registered title their own mother had never intended to create.
What the law says, and what we did
Costa Rica’s Land and Colonization Law includes a legal mechanism built for situations like this one: special agrarian usucapión. Unlike ordinary adverse possession under the Civil Code, this route does not depend on the possessor being unaware that someone else holds registered title. It starts from the opposite premise: possession that the registered owner tolerates (“precario”), exercised out of need, for the subsistence of the possessor or their family. Under Articles 92 and 101 of that law, someone who has farmed land under those conditions for more than ten years can ask to be recognized as its legitimate owner, even when the Registry says otherwise.
The usufruct the mother passed on did not settle any of this on its own. A usufruct is the right to use and enjoy someone else’s property; it is not ownership, and it does not convert into ownership simply because time goes by. What the court had to weigh was something different: how this family had actually held and worked the farm, for how long, and why.
We filed the ordinary special-agrarian-usucapión claim before the Agrarian Court, seeking recognition of our clients as the farm’s legitimate owners and an annotation on the property record to protect that right while the case moved forward. We also requested a protective order allowing the family to keep peaceful possession of the land while the merits of the case were decided.
The nephews countersued, claiming registered ownership and seeking to recover the land through a reivindication action. The court-ordered site inspections of the farm, meanwhile, confirmed what the family had always known: active corn, plantain, and fruit crops, cattle, and four houses, all actively worked and inhabited by our clients.
With that record in hand — years of open, peaceful and uninterrupted possession, devoted to the family’s subsistence — we argued the claim before the court.
The court granted the special agrarian usucapión claim, recognized our clients as the farm’s legitimate owners, and ordered the property registered in their name, rejecting the nephews’ reivindication claim.
After a lifetime spent farming that land, our clients stopped being merely its possessors and were recognized as its owners.
Why we’re telling this story
In rural Guanacaste, many families have handled their land informally for generations, relying on verbal agreements or on documents whose real consequences nobody explained at the time. When a title ends up registered in a way the family never intended, the people who have lived on and worked the land for years can suddenly find themselves treated as intruders in their own home.
Costa Rican agrarian law does protect someone who has possessed land in good faith and put it to productive use for years, even against a title registered in someone else’s name — but proving it takes the right evidence: active crops, housing, court-ordered inspections, and a firm defense against any attempt to push them off the land.
At Libre Verdad, we support farming families across Guanacaste in disputes like this one: from assessing whether their possession meets the requirements for special agrarian usucapión, to representing them before the Agrarian Court when a relative tries to disregard rights earned through years of working the land. If your family possesses and farms land that someone else now claims as their own, we are glad to review your case. Contact us by DM.
Confidentiality Notice: This story is based on a real case handled by Libre Verdad. To protect the privacy of those involved and comply with our professional duty of confidentiality, the names, certain facts, and some identifying details have been changed. Any resemblance to identifiable individuals is solely for illustrative purposes.
Related reading:
Another story about possession and registration. In that case the land had never been registered by anyone, which is a different legal situation from the dispute described here.
Información general, no constituye asesoría legal. / General information, not legal advice.
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