Monteverde & Santa Elena
The Bat Jungle in Monteverde is a small but informative exhibit, with good bilingual educational displays and a habitat housing almost 100 free-flying bats. Make a reservation for your 45-minute tour to learn about echolocation, bat wing aerodynamics and other amazing flying-mammal facts.
The bats are on a reversed day/night schedule so they are most active from 9am to 5pm.
Located beneath Cafe Caburé.
Parque Nacional Volcán Arenal
11.68 MILES
From 1968 until 2010, Volcán Arenal was an ever-active and awe-striking natural wonder, producing menacing ash columns, massive explosions and streams of…
10.7 MILES
If you're travelling between Monteverde and Arenal, there's no good excuse for skipping this stop. Viento Fresco is a series of five cascades, including…
17.48 MILES
Two kilometers northeast of Venado (Spanish for ‘deer’) along a good dirt road, these caves are an adventurous excursion into an eight-chamber limestone…
2.07 MILES
The exquisitely misty 310-hectare Reserva Santa Elena offers a completely different cloud forest experience from Monteverde. Cutting through the veiled…
29.88 MILES
In front of the Church of San Rafael, this park was a normal plaza until the 1960s, when a gardener named Evangelisto Blanco became inspired to shave the…
Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde
1.46 MILES
This beautiful cloud forest reserve came into being in 1972, when the Quaker community (which had already set aside a third of its property for…
18.89 MILES
It’s an animal rescue center. It’s a volunteer project. It’s Spanish classes. This community-based organization is doing a lot of good, and you can…
23.39 MILES
This wild-animal shelter was started in the 1960s by the late Lilly Hagnauer, a Swiss environmentalist. It’s one of the largest shelters of its kind in…
0.51 MILES
Head here for everything you ever wanted to know about butterflies. There are four gardens representing different habitats; they're home to more than 40…
0.54 MILES
This simple meeting house in Monteverde is the ‘church’ of the American Society of Friends, or the Quakers, who first settled this area and committed to…
0.85 MILES
For those who prefer their reptiles under glass (or at least behind it), a guide will show you around and introduce you to more than 50 species of…
0.92 MILES
This sweet-smelling garden in Santa Elena has shady trails winding past more than 500 types of orchids. On your guided tour, you’ll see such rarities as…
0.93 MILES
Returning to its former glory as the Ranario, or Frog Pond (it's changed names a few times), this place also features an insect house. The frogs are still…
0.94 MILES
There's no sign, no website, and last we checked, nobody was collecting any money for this delightful roadside attraction. It's simply a hollowed-out fig…
0.99 MILES
A local landmark in the center of Santa Elena. The adjacent roasted-chicken shack apparently has no religious affiliation.
8. Reserva Biológica Bosque Nuboso Monteverde
1.46 MILES
This beautiful cloud forest reserve came into being in 1972, when the Quaker community (which had already set aside a third of its property for…