Costa Rica Family Vacation 2026: Monteverde

After a long day of travel, including a layover in Atlanta, we finally arrived in San Jose!  We had private transportation booked to take us to Monteverde, which was another 2.5 hour drive and man am I glad they did the driving.  It was so many winding roads going uphill to get us to Monteverde.  But, we arrived, checked in, and had dinner at the resort's restaurant on the patio.  It gets dark in Costa Rica at 6pm every day, so it felt weird to be eating when it was pitch black outside.  We took the kids to the pool for a little bit and then Eric and Ana arrived so we had a cocktail with them at the restaurant before going to bed.  

On our first full day, Sunday, we had breakfast in the restaurant and it was delicious!  Especially their french toast.  We had a guided tour at the Cloud Forest Biological Reserve that included hiking through the Reserve and learning about the animals, birds, and insects.  We got lucky and saw monkeys right at the start.  The Chapuchin (white-faced monkey) was fighting with a Spider monkey.  We also saw lots of unique birds, hummingbirds, a tarantula, and two pit viper snakes.  It sprinkled on us a bit, but the trees helped block the brunt of it.  Overall, it was a really nice tour!

We went back to the resort for a break and some lunch.  I enjoyed this pretty room they had with tons of plants and windows.  I read for a while, played Uno with Sean, went for a little hike on the property with Sean, and then got ready to go to our Don Juan coffee, sugarcane, and chocolate tour.  It was pretty interesting and started with chocolate.  We saw the fruit that cocoa beans come from, how they're then picked, dried, and processed.  Our guide then made us sample some different beans that had been peeled and smushed.  He also made a really tasty chocolate paste.  Lots of yummy samples were put out and then we moved on to learn about sugarcane.  Sean helped the guide crank this machine that turned the sugarcane into liquid and he mixed it with fresh lemons to make juice.  It was great - especially with some liquor he let the adults add!  Last, was the coffee part of the tour with lots of samples at the end.  It was a nice tour and I feel like the kids learned a lot.

That evening we got cleaned up back at the resort and walked into town to have dinner at The Treehouse Restaurant.  It truly was a restaurant built up and around this huge tree!  What a unique experience!  The food was pretty good too.  Back at the resort, we checked out Eric and Ana's room that had a bathtub on their balcony.  

On Monday, another full day in Monteverde, we split up for the day with activities.  Eric, Ana, and my parents went on a full-day birding tour with a guide that included lunch.  The four of us went to Selvatura to zipline and go to a sloth sanctuary.  We got very lucky with weather and it didn't rain on us!  The ziplining was amazing!  There were 13 different platforms, some that included some hiking to get to.  We also had the option to the tarzan swing and Sean was the only brave one to do it.  Afterwards, we had a snack and waited for our sloth sanctuary tour to start.  While walking through the forest to get to the sanctuary, we actually saw one high up in the trees!  The sanctuary had 12 sloths, all female, that are getting rehabbed, but most likely won't return to the wild.  They were beautiful creatures!

We had the bus drop us off in the town so we could grab some lunch.  The boys picked a pizza place that looked a little sketchy at first, but the pizza was fantastic!  We walked back to the resort to swim for a while in the pool and relax.  Then, it was dinner out with Grandma and Grandpa.  We picked a place called Morpho's, but the GPS had us go to their old location that's closed so it took us a bit to find it and people were a little...crabby.  Dinner was pretty good and we weren't ready to call it a night so we took a taxi to Monteverde Brewing Company where we enjoyed some beer and games of Uno.  

The next morning we packed up, ate breakfast one more time at the restaurant, and got on our bus that would take us to our next destination: La Fortuna.  I highly recommend the Monteverde Lodge and Gardens.  It was absolutely beautiful, secluded with only 31 guest rooms, and felt very fancy, but environmentally friendly at the same time.