Guadalupe Urbina

Urbina is the subject of the 2019 documentary film Los caminos del amor, which covers her life and work.

In the mid-1990s, Urbina moved to the Netherlands. After her move, she continued composing music, combining her own musical compositions with the traditional songs of Guanacaste folklore that she encountered in her research. She returned to Costa Rica in the early 2000s. In 2011, she performed a collection of works of the oral tradition of her birthplace of Guanacaste at the National Theatre of Costa Rica, where she first performed in 1989.

In 1988, Urbina performed at the Estadio Nacional de Costa Rica as a part of the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour. She received the Gaviota from the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, in 1994 for her work with oral tradition. A year later, she was presented with the Premio América from Radio France by Youssou N'Dour.

Her first experience with music was through her mother Angelita Juárez, who introduced her to the oral tradition of Guanacaste, and the ranchera music she heard on the radio when she was an infant. By the time she was 8 years old, she had become a frequent performer at family events, with the large repertoire of traditional stories, songs, and rhythms she had learned from her mother or from local radio station broadcasts. When she was 11 years old, her mother died, and she was sent to San José to live with her older sisters. In San José, she was influenced by world music and the counterculture movement, listening to Joan Baez and the Latin American music of the 1970s.

Guadalupe Urbina (born 28 October 1959) is a Costa Rican singer-songwriter and composer. She is a folk musician whose musical compositions reflect the oral tradition of her birthplace of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She received the Gaviota in 1994 for her works of oral tradition.

Urbina was born and raised in Sardinal, Guanacaste, a coastal town in the region. She is the youngest of 10 siblings from a family of Nicaraguan immigrants who immigrated to Costa Rica in the 1930s. She was born into a rural household with no electricity, and had no shoes until she was 11 years old.