Guests often ask what changed here.
Three years ago Almonds & Corals was a 24-room jungle lodge inside the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, with a loyal following and a building that had started to show its age. Today it is a 30-room four-star boutique hotel, on exactly the same footprint. Not one additional metre of forest was cleared to do it.
The rebuild took nine months with the hotel closed. New rooms, new systems, a new restaurant. The part that is harder to see is the part that mattered most: all twenty employees stayed through it. They painted, they cleaned, they organised materials, and they came back into a hotel they had helped rebuild.
That is why the numbers moved the way they did. Our Booking.com score went from 8.2 to 9.2. MOCA, our restaurant, now serves more walk-in guests than hotel guests, with a Google rating of 4.8. We hold Blue Flag certification, and CST, Costa Rica’s national sustainability standard. Last year not a single person left the fixed team.
Certificates are earned once. A 9.2 is earned every day, by the person who carries your bag, the one who remembers how you take your coffee, and the one who fixes the thing you never noticed was broken.
Those people have names. Donald Cruz is our General Manager. Raquel Valverde is Front Desk Manager, and usually the first face you meet. Lola Diaz is Head of Housekeeping. Cesar Santos is Head of Maintenance. Kenneth Jinesta is F&B Manager at MOCA.
They carried this property through its transformation and they run it now. The standard you will meet when you arrive is theirs.
The transformation was led by Tara Nowacki, who handed the operation to Donald and his team in September 2026 and continues to work with hotel owners across Costa Rica and Central America at taranowacki.com.
We are still in the same forest, two kilometres before Manzanillo, with the same howler monkeys overhead. There are simply more of us who know your name.