Cascada De Fuego

We checked the beds because of the bed bug reviews we’d read, and thankfully didn’t find any. Still, our room smelled oddly like a dead animal. I wondered if management was changing, and although that can be difficult, the priorities seemed out of line. Some showers didn’t get warm, so I used my classmate’s room. The food was bad and confusing. I’m vegan, but had settled for vegetarian options on this trip because many places can’t accommodate vegan diets. They really didn’t seem to know what to do with vegetarians either: there was no protein, and the food was lukewarm. I hope things improve, but I wouldn’t recommend staying until the reviews get better.

The place felt like a mess. On our first night there was a bat in our room, with several bugs in and around it, and there were lizards crawling on the dining hall walls while we ate. Fire ants got into our shoes. The room had been broken into, and there was no soap for washing our hands. Showers never got hot, and the pools weren’t clean; the hot tubs weren’t actually hot either. The only thing I liked was that the bushes were trimmed into animal shapes.

Our tour group found bed bugs throughout the rooms. Staff said this was normal and began cleaning and dusting, but we refused to spend the night there and switched hotels. I’m not sure whether our belongings were infested too, since they had been in the rooms for a while. Disgusting. It doesn’t deserve even one star.

We were robbed on our second night. Items worth thousands of dollars were taken across the cabins, and I absolutely wouldn’t recommend this place. The accommodations were sketchy, even by the standards of the other sketchy places we’d stayed during our university study abroad program. The lobby had these huge, creepy wooden carvings of snakes eating people. Breakfast was inedible. The pool was cold, though it felt good.