While many travelers come to Costa Rica for its fabulous beaches and big surf, the Monteverde experience offers something completely different. Set up in the Tilaran mountain range, it's here you will find the unique cloud forest, with an amazing array of wildlife, plants, and adventure travel opportunities. The top place to call home for some nights here is the beautiful Monteverde Lodge & Gardens, one of four properties run by Böëna Wilderness Lodges that are set in Costa Rica's most beautiful natural locations (the others being in the Osa Peninsula, Tortuguero canals, and on the banks of the Pacuare River).
Set just a short walk from downtown sleepy Monteverde (Santa Elena), Monteverde Lodge & Gardens has been featured as part of National Geographic's Tours of a Lifetime and boasts its own private reserve and walking paths, plentiful wildlife, and just 28 rooms set around designer-themed gardens. Everything here is about green and nature, and every room looks out to either garden or forest, immersing one in the magical wet cloud forest. If you're lucky, you might even see a sloth outside your window, and there is plenty of epic birdlife. The lodge employs its own guides should you need an expert, and the tour desk arranges trips up to the nearby Monteverde Cloud Forest and Santa Elena Cloud Forest Reserves, as well as to waterfalls, hanging bridges, zip-lines, and other outdoor opportunities that Monteverde is famed for.
Make sure to do a night walk while you are in town. My wife and I went out for an evening and were able to spot eyelash vipers, red-eyed and poison dart frogs, sloths, opossums, and other amazing inhabitants of the cloud forest. Guides here bring scopes so you can view the wildlife close up, and are even well-trained in taking photos with your phone camera through the lens.
Monteverde Lodge & Gardens is a sustainability-focused property and has bought 2000 acres of primary and secondary forest in fragile locations near national parks and along vital biological corridors to manage. Additionally, the team here buys locally, employs a solar energy system for heating, has gotten rid of single-use plastic (even providing 100% biodegradable straws made out of local avocado seeds!), and is even moving to the use of kelp algae for fertilizer in the gardens, as well as switching to insecticides made of tobacco and smoke.
You are guaranteed a real green stay here, plus some totally unique experiences, so start making your cloud forest plans in Monteverde now.