Monteverde · Where to stay

Where the buses arrive and where the banks, supermarkets, sodas and cheapest rooms are. You can walk to dinner, which nowhere else up here allows, and take a taxi or shuttle to the reserves in the morning.

Lodges spread along the road between Santa Elena and the cloud forest reserve, quieter and closer to the trailheads, often with forest at the door. The trade-off is that every meal and every errand becomes a drive, and the road is not kind to small cars.

The scattered settlements around Santa Elena, Cañitas among them, run cheaper than the tourist road and put you among farms rather than lodges. You will want wheels; the walk into town in the dark and the rain is not a plan.

Monteverde sits between roughly 1,200 and 1,750 metres on the Continental Divide, and it is damp more or less permanently. Check the room has hot water and enough blankets, check whether the access road is paved, and pack a fleece — people arrive from the coast dressed for the coast and regret it.