Sustainable, Local, Luxury: The Building Blocks of Ocotea

The values of the Ocotea Boutique Hotel from the very start have been to prioritize sustainable, local, ethical products and services with an uncompromising dedication to luxury-level quality. For Founders Karen and Valeria Fallas, there would be no other way to deliver the absolute best that Monteverde has to offer while staying true to the foundational values of Monteverde itself.

During the day both of the inspiring women who lead the Ocotea Boutique Hotel are often very busy, helping with everything from welcoming guests to making sure that everything is going smoothly in Nectandra Restaurant. 

That’s why we were thrilled to get the chance to sit down with the two of them and discuss their dedication to environmentally sustainable, community-focused products, and how they’ve overcome countless challenges to hold to these values and also deliver a truly luxurious product. 

The Foundational Values of Monteverde

As we began our discussion, it became clear immediately that Monteverde has a community-wide, grassroots focus on environmental education for everyone in the region. When Karen was growing up at school, she started environmental education at only six years old, and understanding conservation and community was taught to every young person in the area. 

With such a strong foundation, it makes a lot of sense that people around Monteverde are constantly keeping an eye out for how to be more sustainable, both for the natural world and in the support of others in the community. 

It’s for this reason that Monteverde, a very small town in the mountains, is able to punch well above its weight as a center for sustainable technologies, hospitality practices, and local government initiatives. 

From the very beginnings of Ocotea Tours, the Fallas family was at the forefront of sustainable tourism, and Karen and Valeria wanted to take the opportunity to build the Ocotea Boutique Hotel from the ground up with the most cutting-edge sustainable materials and practices available in the area. 

“We are building from 0, and we want to be the most responsible place that we can, trying to do the best that we can, and to do our part to help others see what can be possible.”

- Karen Fallas

Doing the Basics Flawlessly…

With a community like Monteverde, essentially everyone learns the basics of household and business sustainability, and you can see these fundamentals executed at a high level in the Ocotea Boutique Hotel. After all, when a big part of the culture is to have solar panels on your home, it only makes sense to do them even more stylishly, effectively, and using the very best technology for the hotel. 

A good example of how the Ocotea Hotel is at the very cutting edge of what’s possible in Monteverde is through their water and power management. The Ocotea Hotel has 10,000 liters of water in its reserve tanks, as well as a robust backup generator for its electricity. How ahead of the game is that? 

Well, multiple times since opening, when there have been maintenance, outages, or shortages of either water or power, the municipality has phoned up Karen and asked if the municipality can temporarily cut the Ocotea Hotel off of the system to direct resources elsewhere, knowing that the hotel will be just fine for an extended period.

And true to form, Karen and the Ocotea team have been happy to oblige. This pursuit of best-in-region sustainability continues into the day-to-day practices at the Ocotea Boutique Hotel. For example, the vast majority of products, ingredients, and supplies used in the hotel are recycled, reusable, or refillable. 

There are no single-use plastics, no disposable containers, no discarded waste, and the results are impressive: in a 21-room hotel, even at full occupancy, Ocotea produces one garbage bag’s worth of trash per week. 

This includes food waste too. Ingredients at the hotel are locally bought and then turned into compost for the garden after being used, and all of the products for cleaning and personal hygiene are biodegradable so that they can be disposed of through cutting-edge biological septic processing which we’ll explore below. 

…And Putting Money Where Their Mouth Is

Another thing that became clear in our conversation with Karen and Valeria was that their dedication to being a leader in sustainability and responsible business management wasn’t just for show, and at every opportunity they’ve chosen their values over short-term costs. 

The fiberglass septic tanks embedded beneath the hotel, which were custom-designed for the exact capacity the hotel would need, are sustainably processed with microorganisms rather than loaded up and emptied onto a truck. This is an expensive process, costing over $1000 a month, but there was no question it was the right call for Karen and Valeria. 

The electrical system was implemented using exclusively underground cabling, ensuring there would be no cables across the property to disrupt the natural habitat or cause a threat to roaming animals. 

For the beds, Karen and Valeria chose local, small-business providers for the frames and mattresses rather than choosing cheaper options they could have trucked in, and relied on a local craftswoman to design and implement the headboards. 

Luxury wood detailing can be a tricky subject in Costa Rica, where there are a number of regulations in place to protect highly desirable trees, which can at times be cut in unscrupulous ways without permits. Fortunately, with the help of internal designers Andres and Sebastian of A Scala Interior Design, the team worked exclusively with certified, reputable providers for all of their finishes. 

As the Ocotea Team continues to expand its offerings, with plans for an exercise studio and additional spaces, you can be sure that these principles will be the guiding light. 

The Challenges in Pursuit of Luxury 

It’s worth noting that buying local and sustainable products that also reach a luxury standard can come with its challenges. For example, when sourcing sustainable biodegradable cleaning and personal products for Ocotea, Karen and Valeria considered working with a local provider but ran into problems with products expiring. 

They expanded their search and eventually found the option to purchase from a women-owned startup from San José that has had huge growth in the past years, but even small compromises in the local-sustainable-luxury vision have led Karen and Valeria to view their practices as a work in progress, with enormous room to grow and continue evolving.

There are also numerous cases where purchasing a local product resulted in selecting the most expensive option, but as Karen took time to explain, the value of a trusted local partner can show in more than the price tag. Too often in the growth of the Ocotea Boutique Hotel, the team reached out to a national company, only to get lowballed, not treated with respect, or outright ignored, though Karen and Valeria have gotten the last laugh. 

“Now that we have grown and found success, many of these firms came back to us, suddenly offering their services, and we’ve happily turned them down, relying on our local partners instead.”

- Karen Fallas

An Investment in Their People and Community

You can look throughout the building process and daily operation of the hotel for examples of choosing to invest in the local people and community. For the physical construction of the hotel, the build team was comprised of 25 workers from the greater Monteverde area, 10 from within an hour’s drive, and only 5 other individuals from around the country. 

With that team, Karen and Valeria put an incredible emphasis on responsible hiring practices, working only with trustworthy and certified firms and ensuring that each person who contributed to the overall work at the Ocotea Hotel was looked after. 

In fact, the only case of an illegal worker on site (which consistently plagues Costa Rican construction firms) was discovered when the Ocotea Team was trying to make sure that the individual in question was properly covered by their insurance and paid fairly, and handled quietly and respectfully. 

This is part of a larger mentality imbued in Karen from 16 years of working with Ocotea Tours. In a small town, part of economic sustainability is investing in the people who work for you, and to this day the Ocotea Group leadership takes that very seriously. 

That looks like hiring locals as guides and drivers and supporting those individuals through regular professional development to educate all members of their team and encourage them to continue learning and improving. It looks like helping drivers upgrade their cars to efficient, top-end shuttles, leading to inspiring stories like that of one driver who was able to purchase a second transport vehicle thanks to Ocotea’s support, and now works alongside his wife as one of the Ocotea Group Tour drivers. 

“We believe that these aren’t just workers, these are our team members and our community members, and they deserve not only respect, but also support and belief. When you invest in the people who work for you and with you, whether that is financially, through trust and opportunity, or simply through respect, you build a better business and a better community.”

- Valeria Fallas

Leading the Charge Is a Never-Ending Journey

As we were winding down this immensely informative conversation, both Karen and Valeria noted that while they extensively follow and learn from sustainability guidelines laid out by Costa Rican tourism experts, they haven’t sought out any formal sustainability certifications just yet. 

“We are growing organically right now, and we need to continue evolving until we’re happy with every part of our process from start to finish. Sometimes, when you go for these certifications, you have to stop in place and formalize your processes, and we don’t want to compromise our daily improvement just for certification.

I was taught the philosophy of doing the most right that you can, and that when you do things right, it’s easy to keep doing things right. It was hard in the beginning, but it is getting easier every day, there will come a time when it’s right for us to call our process done (at least for now), but we’re not there yet. 

- Karen Fallas

We’d like to thank Karen and Valeria for taking the time to share this incredible insight into the Ocotea Boutique Hotel, and how it has grown from an aspirational dream into a tangible, real example of what can be done with hard work, a little ingenuity, and faith in your people and your community.