In Monteverde, there are no clear lines between where civilization ends and nature begins. Instead, it’s a gradual change, where carefully trodden paths offer us the chance to explore cloud forest reserves, where the natural world comes right up to your front porch, and beauty both ecological and manmade is constantly intertwined with each other.
Founders of the Ocotea Boutique Hotel Karen and Valeria Fallas wanted to make sure that the Ocotea Boutique Hotel’s two gardens embodied this integration of rich, living nature and human comfort, creating a place that feels both comfortable within the grounds of a luxury hotel, and yet also feels like taking your first steps into the wild world of the Monteverde cloud forests.
In this article, we sat down with Karen and Valeria to discuss the Ocotea gardens, and how they embody the idea of a lifescape — a living habitat carefully integrated with the natural world — far more than the simple, controlled landscaping found in so many hotels around the globe.
The gardens are an integral part of the Ocotea Boutique Hotel’s experience. There are two, the back garden and the front garden, which is a lot of space reserved for nature on a small footprint. But as Karen and Valeria describe the design process of the Ocotea Boutique Hotel, having a robust, living garden was never in question.
Instead, the garden was part of the identity of the hotel from the beginning, and Karen and Valeria fought to make sure that as much native life remained, ensuring there were places with living, old trees that a person could enjoy for years to come, just like a local might have in their own garden.
Families in Monteverde invite their gardens and natural surroundings to be vibrant, living additions to the areas around their homes, allowing fruit trees to prosper and staying away from massive landscaping projects and tree cutting. Instead, the emphasis is on allowing the natural, unique state of the land to remain as unchanged as possible, and inspire the use of the garden.
You can see this throughout the current landscape of the Ocotea gardens. A massive boulder is a convenient table, not an inconvenience. There is a corner where orchids thrive, some fruiting trees, and dozens of other species that existed here naturally, preserving the heritage of this spot in a living, changing way.
This mentality of living and changing heritage is present in more ways than one. In the early days of dreaming up the Ocotea Boutique Hotel, the garden was a passion project of Don Ignacio Fallas, Karen’s father, who was instrumental in adding fruiting trees alongside other species of native trees and plants that landscapers knew would thrive in the Monteverde.
Today, each of those plants and trees is a thriving, living homage to those who helped bring Ocotea Boutique Hotel to life and continues to provide tranquility and beauty every day for countless people around the world who come to visit.
As Karen and Valeria explain, it’s incredibly rewarding to have the everyday experience at Ocotea so intertwined with nature. On any given day, you can step out onto your personal terrace, onto the back terrace by Nectandra, or sit on a bench under the trees and work, chat with a friend, or simply breathe in fresh air while you watch for birds and butterflies, or take in the finest details of the orchids.
And because this is an unrestrained island of nature, there’s something new to discover in the garden every time you visit. Birds flit in and out of the trees looking for fruit and eating bugs and beetles they can find on the trees. Bees and butterflies migrate through the area, busy and bustling as they pollinate flowers and fruits. There are even armadillos and troops of coatis that come through the front garden on occasion from the forest across the street.
It’s not just animals that bring something new to discover each day. In Karen and Valeria’s most recent garden census, done with the help of the enigmatic local jack-of-all-trades Eladio Cruz Leiton, they identified that there are 20 different trees in the Ocotea Garden, covering 10 different species including the Ocotea Tree, the Damas Tree, strange local trees like the Guabo Peludo, Murta, Guayabillo de Sabana, Rabo de Lagarto, and other fruiting trees like the Manzana de Monte.
While these are steady, slow-growing organisms, they burst to life in flowers, leaves, and fruits depending on the season. The many different species of flowers also pop to life with incredible colors depending on the season, and it’s worth noting one corner of the garden, the orchid garden, that has become a personal passion project for Karen.
After discovering that many species of orchids already inhabited a small area in the Ocotea garden, Karen began to add to this colorful corner, collecting orchid seeds and seedlings from all around the area and giving them a place to thrive. Currently, there are 170 small orchids, and that number is growing every month, thanks to a collaborative process with other gardeners in the area. In many ways, it’s an excellent representation of Monteverde itself!
We asked Karen and Valeria some of their favorite ways to enjoy the garden, and some of the best times of day to visit, and they had this to say.
“Well, it changes depending on the day. Sometimes, you want to have a coffee and sit outside, sometimes you want to go out in the afternoon and read, sometimes it’s just the perfect day to feel the breeze on your skin.
There’s a special smell at night, and in the dark being out in the gardens can be intensely personal, while you hear the coyotes and howler monkeys calling out in the mountains. But on the other hand, in the early morning, it’s calm and peaceful, and you can see the flowers start to open.
The one thing that is universal is that if you pay attention, you can find something new to discover every time you look. It’s a welcoming but wild place, and it’s all around us.”
Thank you to Karen and Valeria for sharing their thoughts on this beautiful piece of natural and family history, a place connected to Monteverde through biology and personal heritage that continues to grow and thrive alongside the hotel.