Hotel Boruca Tamarindo

The staff were excellent and friendly. They even offered to make us a small fruit bowl breakfast if our tour meant we missed the usual breakfast time. The location is great for the beach, bars, and restaurants. The rooms are a bit old and noisy. I woke at 6:00 thinking I’d left all the windows open, but the glazing is just really poor. I don’t think the hotel can be blamed for complaints about the street or its condition.

Hotel Boruca felt cozy and personal, and to me it gave a more authentic Costa Rica experience than many of the newer Tamarindo developments. The staff are wonderful, and the rooms are simple and comfortable. The location is hard to beat: close to the action, but not right in the noise all the time.

The location is very convenient, and the room was neat and clean. Good service too, and breakfast was a nice extra with enough choices for a week.

The street outside the hotel smelled of garbage. At check-in, the receptionist was on the phone and left us standing there for 15 minutes in 35-degree heat with our big backpacks, then gave us almost no information. The room she showed us wasn’t very clean, and she’d handed us the wrong key, so we had to go back and get it changed. When we turned on the sink, about 1,000 ants came out and started crawling everywhere. We complained later, but the receptionist said the only problem was the ants and that they weren’t the hotel’s fault. The service was very bad, and it wasn’t a nice place, especially for the price.