 This prevented the establishment of large "haciendas".For all these reasons Costa Rica was by and large unappreciated and overlooked by the Spanish Crown and left to develop on its own.The small landowners' relative poverty, the lack of a large indigenous labor force, the population's ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, and Costa Rica's isolation from the Spanish colonial centers in Mexico and the Andes, all contributed to the development of an autonomous and individualistic agrarian society.