The second boom was also related to the Quakers. Recognizing the need for clean water for their farms and the cheese factory, the Quakers set aside a large tract on the highest part of the mountain. This became the Monteverde preserve, famous for the cloud forest protected there (a cloud forest is a high-altitude rainforest with a distinctive botanical community). In the 70's and later, this preserve (and adjacent preserves including the really large Children's' Eternal Rainforest, purchased with donations from schoolchildren around the world) grew and fused together to form a very large area of interlocking preserves. Thus, ecotourism forms the basis of the second economic boom here.
Arguably, a third boom is occurring today as the ecotourism expands into "adventure tourism" (zip lines) and plain old tourism.
So, what is there to clarify - simply the name of the place! Most people familiar with Costa Rica easily recognize the name Monteverde, but few recognize the tiny town of Santa Elena that is at the heart of the sprawling tourist mecca today. The term Monteverde is used variably to refer to the Quaker community, the cloudforest preserve, or the whole mountaintop including Santa Elena. On this website I will use a more contrary approach, reserving Monteverde to refer to one of the preserves, and calling everything else Santa Elena.
Although the trip was long, the students were enthralled by the scenic wonders around them.
Lake Arenal, formed by dams on the continental divide, serves several purposes - irrigation and other water supplies for the arid Guanacaste Province on the west coast, recreation, and hydropower in a country with little in the way of oil or gas reserves. To supplement the hydropower, windmills are popping up on the hillsides around Lake Arenal, taking advantage of the strong and consistent winds that also make the lake a prime spot for windsurfing. While we were in-country in 2007, an announcement was made that an effort would also be made to tap into the geothermal resources of Rincón de la Vieja.
Across the street from the hotel was the Farmacia Vitosi - part pharmacy, part general store, with a little bit of everything. It was handy to be able to buy Cipro over the counter for an infected tick bite. Also nearby was a good market which allowed some of us to take a break from all the restaurant food and have some simple meals of granola and guanabana yogurt (which they didn't have on the 2007 trip to my great disappointment).
Above: Children's' cereal looks pretty much the same everywhere. Roditas are red and apparently strawberry flavored; Chokos are the same thing but chocolate (and with a different cartoon pitchman). I'm not sure what Tri-juelas are, but they apparently are the nutritional high ground here, containing both yogurt and honey. The price works out to less than $2 a box.
Below: the main street in Santa Elena, with a flock of 4WD taxis and vans waiting to take tourists to the various locations around town. All of the taxis are either vans or SUV's - the roads here demand it, although in 2007 we were surprised to find that the main road had been paved from Santa Elena out to the gas station almost halfway to the Monteverde preserve.
Carrie, Tyler and Dr. Cress at the Ranario, 2005.
Duellmanohyla rufioculis, the rufous-eyed stream frog at the Ranario.
Gaudy Leaf Frog - Agalychnis callidryas.
The
Gaudy Leaf Frog. To the left, an active frog at night displays the
bright red feet, eyes, and blue sides and leg that make it gaudy.
During the day, however, all the bright stuff is tucked under the body
where it cannot be seen (below, below right). In addition to camouflaging
the frog, this posture cuts down on evaporation, a threat to the frogs as
in nature they spend the day perched on a Heliconia leaf exposed to
sun and dry air (well, as dry as it gets in a rainforest...)
Also in Santa Elena you can find a Serpentarium, Mundo de los Insectos (Insect World), an Orchid Garden and a Hummingbird Gallery.
Below, the Soda La Central also served up tasty meals - and they had chan.
Left, Justin photographs a large walking stick that showed up one night at the hotel. Even in an "urban" environment, there was always something to see.
Below, two businesses closer to the Monteverde refuge. On the left is CASEM, a cooperative started in 1982 to give local women an outlet for their artistic productions. Most of the artists working with the cooperative are still women, and they produce an amazing variety of crafts. On the right, below, is the adjacent coffee shop, which offers free-trade coffee and a variety of coffee-related items.
Until the recent boom in ecotourism, the cheese factory was the economic engine of the Santa Elena region. Started by the Quakers in the early 1950's, today it processes milk for a number of producers, both Quaker and Tican. All of the producers must buy into the corporation, and many are very small producers. Let's take a quick look at the process.
It starts with the cows, of course. These are Joe Stuckey's cows; Joe is a nephew of one of the original Quaker settlers and has lived in Monteverde for over 40 years. Dairy cattle do OK up here in the mountains, bit not very well in the hotter low elevations of Costa Rica, where beef cattle predominate. Note the condition of the road behind the cows; that is the road to the farm and you can see why the several milk cans of milk produced by the cows are moved by cart the short distance to the factory instead of by a big milk truck.
The small producers keep their herds in small (several acres) pastures; the cows are moved from pasture to pasture almost daily on a strict rotation; this ensures that the ground remains covered (reducing erosion, important on this steep terrain) and promotes natural grass growth (it takes the pastures about a month to recover from the grazing and process the nutrients left behind in the cow droppings). Thus, the pastures (each farmer will have about 30) are an integral and important part of an ecologically sustainable management scheme. Large industrial dairy operations in the US and elsewhere may have thousands of head of cattle, many of which never leave the feedlot. The grains are harvested and brought to them, rather than having the cattle walk to the grass - and the concentrated wastes from so many cattle require a sewage treatment plant to process, with many of the nutrients being released to local waterways. The photo below shows a typical hillside which has been partitioned into a number of small pastures, often using trees ("living fence").
At the factory, not all the milk arrives by cart. Outlying producers may send their milk in by tanker truck, much as it is done in the US. While it is possible to get the milk to the factory this way, it would be impractical to move it to market in Liberia or San Jose in its liquid form. Hence the cheese factory, which converts the milk from a heavy, easily spoiled commodity to a more concentrated (one of the first steps is to solidify the milk and press out the excess water) and less perishable product. Above right, a local guide starts our tour at the unloading dock. The factory has local guides come in to do the tours, helping to spread the ecotourism bucks around. Right, the main production floor. The milk is curdled in the large oval vats; the curds are then loaded into the square metal trays which are then pressed together by a hydraulic press (next to the moving worker). More water is pressed out at this point, and the cheese is then moved to adjacent cold rooms for storage which can last for days up to a period of a year or so depending on what type of cheese is being made. The factory can also produce other specialty foods from milk including ice cream, caramel, yogurt and so on.
Left - the end of the tour ends with a tasting, and Annie is enjoying this! The Cheese Factory was actually the result of some good planning by those original Quakers. They found a niche for themselves, they protected some key habitat (though for practical, not altruistic reasons), and, as the business grew, they reached out to the local community to provide jobs and a market for milk. This in turn has helped to stabilize the area and perhaps contributed to the conservation ethic here as people were not so desperate as to have to turn to the quick path of enrichment through extractive activities such as logging. The cheese factory has spun off a number of other businesses; the only gas station on the mountain is run by the employees of the cheese factory, and of course all of the ecotourism has its base in the original preserve.
The Quakers were also concerned about environmental issues; sometimes they were far in the lead when it comes to these issues. One problem they faced was what to do with the "wastes" from the cheese factory. A lot of water is squeezed from the cheese as it is formed; this liquid (the whey) contains the milk sugar lactose as well as several other proteins. In many places it is processed to be used as food additives (or to produce specialty cheeses). These methods wouldn't really work at Monteverde, so an alternative to simply dumping it into the rivers had to be found. Our groups in both years took an additional tour not usually given to the normal tourist - we walked up the road a ways to the WWTP (wastewater treatment plant) for the cheese factory - a place that looked mysteriously like a hog farm (below).
Basically the WWTP is a hog farm! We walked through a disinfectant bath (to prevent us from bringing diseases on our shoes to the several thousand closely packed swine, right).
Make no mistake - unlike the dairy operations that feed the cheese factory, this is industrial farming, but with a purpose. Below, you can see piglets in the farrowing barn and a young pig in its barn. There are thousands of pigs here; their eventual fate is to end up as lunch meat in a growing and profitable sideline for the cheese factory. Their purpose, however, is to eat all that whey coming down the hill from the cheese factory. The sugars and protein in the whey (along with some additional nutrition from other sources) allows the hogs to grow quickly, and the whey is effectively recycled.
The story does come close to ending in the waste lagoons like the one to the left. Here, the relatively clear liquid coming from the separator above is fed into two ponds. In the ponds, natural processes remove much of the remaining organic material, releasing it to the atmosphere or incorporating it into the bodies of plants and algae (and eventually insects, fish, frogs, birds and the like). The lagoons don't always work perfectly; if they do not remove enough of the organic material it will pass into the river below the lagoons (the overflow is piped some distance downstream to avoid drinking water sources and ecologically sensitive habitat) and pollute the river by encouraging algal growth and reducing oxygen levels in the streams as bacteria break down the remaining organic material.
We saw the usual domestic animals in Santa Elena as well. The dog in the lower picture adopted us at one of the restaurants one night as we ate dinner and spent the rest of our stay with us at the hotel, sleeping in one of the chairs in the common area. We saw fewer dogs in 2007, and none of them followed us around. The cat, above, literally was on a hot tin (or is it aluminum?) roof.
The big story in Monteverde and Santa Elena today is the old question of a paved road. As mentioned earlier, there is no paved road to the mountaintop; this makes it a long ride to get there and no doubt dissuades many tourists from even trying. For many in Monteverde, that's just fine. They don't want to see the way of life change any more than it has; while many have made their peace with relatively low-impact ecotourism, the recent upswing in more traditional tourism with zip lines, ATV trails, upscale restaurants and hotels (and the enclave lifestyle that goes with them with tourists largely isolated from the local population) has been a concern to these folks and they see a paved road as only increasing such problems. On the other hand, those making their living from tourism (such as the owner of the vehicle sporting this "Monteverde needs the road" bumper sticker) see increased access as a way to increase revenues from tourist dollars and (perhaps) improve the infrastructure and lives of those in the area. People are vocal on both sides, and both sides are correct in their assumptions - the road would no doubt increase access, tourism, profits, taxes, infrastructure, employment, noise, congestion, population, pollution, opportunities, education, etc. The problem comes in to what extent the real benefits would outweigh the disadvantages and to what extent people want their lifestyles to change ( I suppose the "rich" of the area are less eager for change than the really poor, although some of those rich might not mind getting richer). The problem is exacerbated by a political system in which decisions must pass through provincial authorities in Putnarenas and then national agencies in San Jose; both are quite removed from the issues on the ground and both bring additional issues to the debate that aren't really relevant to what the local folks want. Right now, Monteverde needs some communal wisdom to work out these details much in the same way the first Quakers found an economic model for the region that served it well for 50 years. As an outsider, I don't have a vote on the issue, but I wish the people of Santa Elena well as they face the future.
