Senda Monteverde Hotel

In the cloud forest above Monteverde in the Puntarenas province of Costa Rica, at 1,400 metres elevation, Senda Monteverde Hotel occupies a position in the most celebrated cloud forest destination in Central America, where the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and the Santa Elena Reserve’s combined 10,500 hectares of protected primary cloud forest support the most diverse epiphyte, orchid, and bird community in the country, including the resplendent quetzal whose presence in the forest has been the primary draw for naturalists and birdwatchers for fifty years. The hotel’s design draws on the Quaker tradition of the community that established Monteverde — American pacifists who settled here in the 1950s to escape military service — through its use of functional materials and honest construction rather than ornament. The cloud forest’s permanent mist gives the surrounding landscape a particular quality of green intensity and atmospheric mystery.

Guided walks in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve for the quetzal, the three-wattled bellbird, and the diverse endemic community of the cloud forest, night walks for the kinkajou, porcupine, and glass frogs that inhabit the forest’s nocturnal canopy, canopy walkway tours above the cloud forest floor, and the hummingbird garden visits that document the 13 species regularly observed in the Monteverde area provide the programme framework for a stay whose primary subject is the extraordinary ecology of the highland cloud forest. The restaurant’s menus draw on the organic farming community of Monteverde, whose cheese and dairy production is among the most celebrated in Costa Rica, and the forest’s own botanical produce.

Senda Monteverde’s relationship with the Monteverde conservation community — the Tropical Science Center that manages the reserve, the Monteverde Institute’s research programme, and the Quaker community’s long engagement with land conservation on the peninsula — reflects the hotel’s awareness that its position in the cloud forest carries an obligation to the conservation work that created the destination’s value in the first place.