I found this place on TripAdvisor and booked it after reading the reviews. I'm glad to say that everything people have said about this place is true. It's location is in town but off the main street so you can easily walk everywhere and still have peace and quiet when you get back to your room. Breakfast is great and reasonably priced. You may even get to see monkeys swinging through the trees in the morning. Staff is friendly and helpful. Room was clean and spacious. I highly recommend this place. Also love the fact that they make an effort to stay green, composting their garbage, keeping chickens to lay eggs for breakfast, recycling, and donating to the community education programs.

We loved our bungalow up on the hill at Arco Iris. It reminded us of a cabin with the wood walls and celing. We were within walking distance to Santa Elena, but far enough away to make it nice and quiet. The staff arranged all our activities and gave us excellent advice on our ziplining and a guide to the cloud forest. The breakfast was very good with lots of fruit, yogurt and breads plus they would make eggs to order for you. The white-faced monkeys lived nearby and they visited us twice in the four days we were there. They came right outside our window and watched us eat breakfast one morning. The only disadvantage to this place was the steep climb when you were walking back from town. Also the pillows and mattress were not the greatest.

We have stayed in many hotels in the Santa Elena Monteverde area and this is now our favorite. We traveled there with a friend and choose this hotel based on the fact we would like accommodations where we could be together, but still have some privacy. This fit the bill. We had two bedrooms, each with their own bath, and a sitting room with a TV. The porch was delightful and we could sit out with our drinks before walking into St Helena for dinner. Couldn't have been more convenient for us. The staff is very helpful and will arrange any type of trip or sightseeing you want. They serve breakfast for $7 which is a good value - bread, fruit, juice, eggs anyway you want them. Although you are close to town and the bus stop, you feel like you are in a park. The "hotel" is actually a group of cabins nestled into the hills, so it's quiet. There is also a half hour walking loop on the property going up into the hills. You can easily drive to the Monteverde Cloud Forest or Santa Elena Reserve. It is a bit tricky to drive to as the sign into the property is very small and at first you think you are driving into an alley. If you go on their website and download their map, it should help you find it if you are driving. We will definitely go back.

We stayed here 3 nights in January 2012. I wouldn't want to find it without GPS, and even then, we passed the alley leading to the entrance the first time around. It is right in the center of town, but on a hill above the commercial area, so it is a quiet oasis close to everything. I didn't want to stay in a hotel abutting the Monteverde Cloud Forest, because I don't like bugs in a hotel room, and I understand that's inescapable when you stay in the forest. The hotel has a private parking area, large front lawn, big front house with reception on the ground floor and breakfast room above. There are rooms and houses scattered from this level on up the hill. The two of us stayed in the 2 bedroom house at the back, and highest point, of the property, with a big, private porch. The path to get to/from the house was steep, and the house was comfortable. We found the town of Santa Elena breezy, and the wind was quite strong at night on the hill where we were located. We paid $7 each for the good breakfast, a buffet with made-to-order farm-fresh eggs. We ate all our other meals and fruit smoothies (esp. guanabana or mango) at Morpho's Restaurant, right at the base of the alley leading up to the hotel, which we liked a lot. In advance, we asked the hotel to book us a private guide for Monteverde Cloud Forest for 7:30 a.m. The guide, Adrian, asked what we wanted to see, and we said "as much as possible." He recommended against going to the Monteverde "Crowd" Forest, so instead we went to the Refugio de Vida Silvestre (with a smaller entrance fee than Monteverde) which included Intermediate Forest as well as Cloud Forest. He was an awesome guide with 20 years experience, an electronic bird-call device for attracting birds, a laser pointer for identifying where to look and a Zeiss 15-45x magnification telescope for getting a good look at everything. We wanted to see the Resplendent Quetzal (bird) and he knew the signs to look for, so we hung around one spot for 20 min. and were rewarded with seeing 2 of them. He also took photos with our camera thru the telescope, to get the best pictures. We only saw 2 other people in 4 hours, each with a private guide. He took extra time to take us to the free Hummingbird Gallery, so he could identify for us the 9 species of hummingbirds that go to the feeders there. On our own, we went to the Monteverde Nature Center and Butterfly Gardens (not to be confused with the Mariposa Butterfly Garden in the same location as the Frog Pond), which is a Do Not Miss. We went to the Frog Pond, esp. to see the Poison Dart Frogs, but the most colorful of these is noctural, but he's very plain when curled up asleep and we didn't go back after dark (which would have been free) to see him unfold his colors. The Monteverde area was our 2nd favorite place in Costa Rica, after Manuel Antonio. We'd go back to this hotel in a heartbeat.