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Monteverde General Info

Monteverde Cloud Forest

Monteverde is a rural, mountainous community located in the beautiful Tilarán Mountains of Costa Rica, and surrounded by tropical forest. The Monteverde area is composed of a small and interesting, multicultural group of Costa Ricans, foreign residents, and tourists drawn together by a magnificent tropical ecosystem. This community started out with five pioneering Costa Rican farming families who settled in this unbroken forest in the late 1940’s. In the early 50’s a group of sixty Quakers arrived, named it Monteverde, and took the initial step toward cloud forest conservation and began dairy farming as a means of livelihood.

Opportunities for hikes in the forest and spotting rare and endangered flora and fauna abound in Monteverde and Costa Rica. Today, Monteverde is one of Costa Rica's main destinations for eco-tourism, boasting the gorgeous cloud forest, the Monteverde Reserve and numerous world-renowned nature and conservation stations amongst limitless adventure tourism options. Monteverde is the perfect place to enjoy the tropical wildlife.

Its Cloud Forest Reserve is one of the most important wild life sanctuaries in the tropics, well known both among scientific researchers and eco travelers. It covers 26,000 acres with more than 2,000 species of plants, 400 species of birds, and 100 different species of mammals. Visitors can take daily guided tours through miles of well maintained trails with excellent opportunities for bird watching. The resplendent Quetzal is often sighted up here (mostly January to July).You can find lots of tours and activities to do during your time here. Rafting, sky walks, canopy tours, a Tarzan swing, hiking in the forest, bird watching, Coffee Tours and horseback riding adventures are all easy to find from local tour operators or your travel agent.

Things to Do:

Butterfly Garden
Admission to the Butterfly Garden entitles you to a guided, naturalist-led tour (in Spanish, English or German) that begins with a discussion of butterfly life cycles and the butterfly's importance in nature. Visitors are taken into the greenhouses and to the screened garden, where hundreds of species flutter. It's best to visit in the morning when the butterflies are most active.

Cheese Factory
Until the recent upswing in ecotourism, Monteverde's number one employer was this cheese factory, also called La Fábrica (the Factory) or La Lechería (the Dairy). Reservations are required for the two-hour tour of operations, where you'll see old-school methods used to produce everything from a creamy gouda to a very nice sharp, white cheddar, as well as other dairy products such as yogurt and, most importantly, ice cream.

World of Insects
Sure, World of Insects has butterflies, but there are probably more mariposarios in this country than canopy tours. What makes this place special is the collection of creepier cloud-forest critters, from hermaphroditic walking sticks to notoriously venomous banana spiders. The yuck factor is high, particularly when viewing hordes of water cockroaches, scorpions and various arachnids.

Frog Pond
With all this mist, it's no wonder that so many amphibians call Monteverde home, and the Frog Pond has about 30 species on display, including newts, salamanders and - of course - a wide assortment of frogs and toads. Guides lead tours through the well-maintained terrariums, and point out the often poisonous frogs with flashlights.
Many resident amphibians are more active at night, so it's best to visit during the evening. Indeed, your ticket allows you to return for free in the evening.

Serpentarium
Biologist Fernando Valverde has collected about 40 species of snakes, plus a fair number of frogs, lizards, turtles and other cold-blooded cuties at his serpentarium. Sometimes it's tough to find them in their foliage-filled cages, but guides are available in Spanish or English for free tours; signage is similarly bilingual. The venomous snake displays are awesome: you'll even get to see your first (and hopefully last) fer-de-lance.