This article reports the findings of a study undertaken to document and explain the use of English in signage in Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country. The linguistic landscape has emerged as an important, viable field of research. In order to investigate how, when, and why the use of English manifests itself, a corpus of 169 photographs of signs was collected on-site in two different cities in the Central Valley. In each city, two neighborhoods were delimited to represent traditional and aspiring areas. The primary findings revealed that the aspiring neighborhoods had a greater number of signs in English; a secondary analysis showed that the signs related to food and beverage were the most common. Pedagogical implications surface by recognizing the linguistic landscape as an informative, impactful resource to increase language literacy and cultural knowledge. Furthermore, it brings to the fore that language shift is occurring in some areas of the Spanish-speaking world.