Finca La Fortaleza

The rooms are spacious and comfortable, and the service is excellent. I’d recommend it.

It’s in a beautiful area, and the view is spectacular. The staff were very professional, but there are a lot of things that need work. The breakfast was very basic, and the bathroom in our room had no privacy at all. We were also expected to clean the rooms at checkout, even though cleaning should be handled by the cleaning staff. The kitchen wasn’t reserved exclusively for guests, either. The owners’ dogs were loose most of the time, making it hard to relax, and they’d steal meat whenever they had the chance, at lunch and dinner. Items in the store cost two or three times the usual price.

I’ll contact Booking.com about what happened, and I definitely won’t be coming back. I’m sharing this so future guests know about things the website doesn’t mention: the animals, the restaurant, gaps under the doors and in the ceilings, and a road that isn’t suitable for regular cars. It’s better to have the full picture. I’ve stayed in other houses, and I wouldn’t recommend this one. The Wi-Fi and Claro cell coverage were poor for us, so keep that in mind. The pool looked lovely in the photos, but the water was cloudy and we couldn’t swim. They advertise a restaurant, but you have to use a food delivery app, which isn’t the same as having one at the accommodation. The road to the house is narrow and in very bad shape, with lots of potholes and some large trucks. Don’t go in a regular car. Honestly, I wouldn’t return even in a Jeep, though not because of the road. They have dogs and a cat, which weren’t mentioned. I’m allergic and had to take medicine I luckily had with me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come. The dogs bark at everyone, even at night, so it’s hard to get back to sleep. The kitchen and dining area still isn’t properly set up. They were painting it while we were eating. The space is small, so I don’t know how they’d manage with a lot of guests, and there’s little privacy. The place is in the countryside, but you can’t blame everything on that. I visit the mountains a lot and know there are insects. Right now I’m in the mountains near Nevados del Ruiz, and this place is completely different even though it’s very rural. The house just isn’t set up properly. Over two nights, we found three cockroaches in our room even though everything was closed. It was really unpleasant. We asked them to wash our laundry. When we got it back, a new pair of pants had been torn by a dog. Nobody told me, and the pants had been put back where I’d hung them, covered in mud and torn. Whoever found them should have let us know instead of leaving them there as though nothing had happened. I think having animals is fine, but guests should be informed. Some people, like me, can’t be around pets for medical reasons. I was keeping an eye on the laundry and even suggested taking it upstairs to the bedroom in case it dried faster, but they said that wasn’t necessary. If someone sees something dirty and torn, they should tell us, especially when it’s obvious a garment was left on the floor. I left mine hanging up.

The view is the only good thing about the hotel. Everything else made for a bad experience, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Breakfast was included, but it was very meager and didn’t even have fruit. The food was also very expensive and basic. For example, rice with meat cost 25,000 pesos. There were nine of us, but they gave us only four towels. They charged an extra 50,000 pesos to add a mattress to a bunk bed. We’ve never been charged separately for mattresses at another hotel, since lodging is charged by the room. They also said a fork was missing even though they had one themselves. That felt disrespectful and poorly planned. We were charged to use the kitchen, but the owners used it at the same time. When you pay for a service, you expect it to be for your group alone. And we were made to empty the bathroom trash cans and clean the rooms. Cleaning is part of the hotel’s responsibility, which is why it’s included when you pay for lodging. We visited with family on December 24th and planned a barbecue, but the owners’ dogs stole our meat. Another dog, practically skin and bones, kept jumping around and acting aggressively. The owners didn’t take responsibility for their animals, and the dogs bothered visitors. At night, they left them out in the cold without beds or blankets, and the poor animals came knocking on our door. Checkout was at 1:00 PM, but it was raining heavily and they still made us leave our rooms early. They had no more reservations, yet chose to leave us in the cold in the open areas of the property.