Casa Marbella

Casa Marbella is a small bed and breakfast facility on the Tortuguero Village. We booked our stay through *******. Before our arrival, Casa Marbella sends detailed instruction on how to reach the public ferry dock, and a time table of the ferry. This helps us to correctly navigates to the ferry landing place. When we reach La Pavona (Embarcadero a Tortuguero), we were surprised to be greeted by a lady working for Casa Marbella, with our ferry tickets at hand. We had a good conversation with the lady when we were waiting for the ferry, and she explained in details of the tours operated by Casa Marbella. We ended up purchasing 3 tours from Casa Marbella: Night wildlife spotting & Jungle walk, the Tortuguero Canal tour, and the Night wildlife spotting & Jungle walk. We have spent more on the tour than our room, and we were pretty satisfied with the tour. The Casa Marbella sits beside the canal with a beautiful dock and dining area that faces the canal. The hotel room is very small and basic though. The plus side is that the room has a working air conditioning unit, which is very useful in the hot and humid Tortuguero weather. Some negative side is that the shower is heated by a small electric heater at the shower head, which frequently trips during the shower. So don’t be surprised if the shower suddenly turn cold, and you should try to turn back the switch that controls the shower heater outside your room. Casa Marbella offers coffee around 5am, to accommodate earlier riser for the morning canal tour. A continental breakfast is offered, with some fruit, coffee and orange juice, and the choice of either bread and scrambled egg or pancakes.

Basic but comfortable and clean room, with a large bathroom and a very pleasant balcony overlooking the canal. The morning tour in the canals is a must, a lot of wildlife spotting is guaranteed. We are very fond of wildlife so we had three tours (all the three mornings of our staying) instead of just one. The first two tours were perfect. In the morning of the third day we found out that they didn't take note of our booking of the tour. However in the end they somehow fixed the problem, so we only have positive memories of Casa Marbella and of its staff.

The place was well maintained. The rooms had air conditioning and the beds were ok. Very little furniture in the room. The place was well laid out and had fans on the patio’s which made it more comfortable. Breakfast was basic but well done. Fresh fruit, eggs or pancakes and coffee tea and chocolate. The best was the guide Luis who made all our tours a great experience, he is knowledgeable and enthusiastic and very friendly.

Nice, basic place for short term stay. Easy walk, 5 minutes from the main port with roller bags (they were not doing private pier drop off when I went). Staff is very responsive and helpful. It's right on the river so constant boat noise day and night, but this is outweighed by beautiful scenery and spectacular sunsets. The bathroom could have been cleaner - there were old soap pieces in the shower soap dish, the sink was gritty and I had no hot water despite following their written instructions.