Early Life
Florencio del Castillo was born in Ujarrás, Costa Rica, near the colonial capital of Cartago, on October 17, 1778. He was the third child of Cecilia del Castillo Villagra (sometimes Cecilia del Castillo Solano), widow of the Frenchman François Lafons. His father is not known; it is possible he was the illegitimate son of the village priest, Luis San Martín de Soto. He grew up in the convent of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception de Rescate de Ujarrás, where he made a living cleaning and working as an altar boy. Doña Cecilia belonged to a distinguished family in Costa Rica and was the owner of some money that allowed her to send her son to the Seminario Conciliar in León, Nicaragua (which later, in 1814, was converted into the University of León), to follow an ecclesiastical career. After being distinguished for his intelligence and spotless record, don Florencio del Castillo presented billiant exams, obtained a baccalaureate and was ordained priest in 1802; the next year he was already a professor of geometry at the same university with an official recommendation.
He returned to Costa Rica preceded by the fame that his merits and virtues had acquired him in Nicaragua, and in 1806 he was named priest to the incipient town of Villahermosa (later Alajuela; but aspiring to a higher destination, he returned in 1808 to León, entering the Tridentine University where he gained the post of professor of Philosophy, which had been one of his most gifted disciplines, and later the more important charges of synodal examiner, prosecutor and vicerector. These rapid promotions, combined with the prestige won during his short return to Costa Rica, meant that when it came time to select a deputy for the province of Costa Rica to the General and Extraordinary Courts in Spain, convened for the salvation of Spain's independence, which was threatened by the formidable power of Napoleon, his name was included, along with that of fray José Antonio Taboada y don José María Zamora.
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