Note that if you purchase something via one of our links, including Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
Rios Lodge is for nature-lovers who want to eat, sleep, and play in the middle of a Costa Rican jungle.
For most restaurant owners, a lot of thought goes into kitchen equipment, but not so much into how it will get delivered. But when your kitchen is in an eco-lodge in the Costa Rican jungle, inaccessible by roads, logistics become a big deal, say, when you want to bring in a large oven.
“I asked the rafting company first how many kilos I can use,” Chef Luc “Luca” Bortoluzzi, Rios Lodge’s chef told me. “They were talking about 500 kilos. The oven was 600 kilos. So we decided to make the trip. But it was not easy.” Once the oven survived the hour-plus journey, eight strong guys spent six hours dragging it from the raft landing to the kitchen.
I stayed three nights at Rios Lodge last January, enjoying the fruits of Luca’s kitchen and the outdoor activities, which is what people come for. Originally from France, Luca fell in love with Costa Rica while traveling around the country in the 1990s. When I asked what made him stay, he said, as if nothing could be more obvious, “The nature! It’s incredible that in a small country you can have the mountains, ocean, volcanoes.”
At Rios, you hear the Pacuare River roaring by 24/7, making its way to the Caribbean Ocean. You’re out in the jungle, surrounded by huge trees dripping with bromeliads and vines. As you walk the paths between cabins, geckos scurry on buildings, spiders weave webs in foliage, and any number of snakes might slither by. It’s a place for nature-lovers only, who are willing to hike or raft in and out.
The Kitchen Is the Center of Things
In the mornings, I sat at a long wooden counter facing the river. Olger Leiva, one of my guides, tracked the movement of leaves as monkeys swinging through trees on the other side. Luca and his seven-person kitchen crew cooked me the vegan version of what’s called the breakfast tipico — black beans, rice, tomato slices, and grilled plantains.
The big open-air restaurant is the center of Rios Lodge. People congregate there day and night, talking, eating, ordering a smoothie or a cocktail, playing board games, or perusing the small library of Costa Rican nature books. Miraculously, there’s even Wi-Fi. I managed to attend a Zoom meeting in the jungle, and you can call people on WhatsApp.
While a more primitive form of the lodge has been open since the ’90s, the current incarnation is only a few years old. Originally called Rios Tropicale, the lodge was founded by Rafael Gallo, known as Rafa, a famous raft guide, founder of the International Rafting Federation, and winner of many eco-awards for his lodge. After Rafa died of cancer during the pandemic, his son Roberto and three rafting entrepreneurs — Arturo Oropeza, Justin Rae, and Sam Drevo — took over ownership. They decided to upgrade everything, especially the dining facilities.
When Luca came onto the scene, there was no kitchen. Raft guides brought supplies for each trip in a cooler and cooked the food themselves. “My vision was to create a nice restaurant in the jungle,” Luca told me. “And the challenge was to bring all the food and all the equipment.” It took about 60 trips by raft to bring everything, including 12 burners, three ovens, a fryer, a grill, three fridges, and a freezer.
Now that the kitchen infrastructure is in place, Luca’s biggest challenge is carefully planning and ordering all the right ingredients. Supply rafts arrive twice a week and need to bring enough food to accommodate diets ranging from vegan to pescatarian to omnivore. “If I forget salt, we have no salt for three days,” Luca said. During my visit, the kitchen ran out of tofu. One night when I asked for a salad with my spaghetti, the server told me it was either/or, one dish per customer. You have to be careful with your food stores when the supply raft isn’t coming for a few days!
Luca has planned the menus so that guests who stay a few days won’t have to repeat meals. Some of his most popular dishes are mahi mahi with a coconut-ginger curry sauce and salmon pasta with pink pepper sauce. I ate everything on the vegan menu, which had an impressive seven dishes to choose from.
The kitchen is still evolving. Luca plans to add a bakery and pastry laboratory, which might be a jungle first.
Powering an Off-the-Grid Eco-Lodge
During my first afternoon at the lodge, two of the owners were there. Arturo, originally from Mexico, lives full-time in Costa Rica. Sam comes and goes from Oregon, where he and Justin co-own eNRG Kayaking. (To my surprise, it turned out that I’d met Sam in 2017 when I took a tour with eNRG. I even have photos on my website of Sam kayaking with his late dog Mojo.)
Arturo and Sam gave me a behind-the-scenes peek at how they can offer perfectly modern accommodations in the middle of the rainforest. Rios runs on about 80% hydropower, plus a little solar — to power everything from the kitchen burners to bathroom lightbulbs. “Sustainability for us is not an option. It’s not a fashion. It’s the only way for us to move forward,” Arturo told me. “We have to be sustainable, because we don’t have any other options. We’re in the middle of nowhere, right?”
Currently the lodge can host up to 110 people at once. The biggest energy drain? Laundry. Some guests request up to six towels in a single day, Arturo said. Not wanting to be one of those guests, I vowed to reuse my one damp towel for the duration. Nothing fully dries in the rainforest.
Most people bring at least two electronic devices, Arturo said. Even in the middle of nowhere, phones, watches, earbuds, batteries, GoPros, drones, computers, and tablets suck up power.
A nearby spring provides the lodge with safe drinking water. Meanwhile, underground, a sand and gravel filtration system handles graywater, and efficient bacteria munch waste in the septic tanks. As we tour the grounds, somebody jokes that they don’t talk about that with the public. “We kind of do, because we want them to understand where we’re at,” Arturo interjected. “They need to know that yes, we thought about it. Yes, we have a solution. Yes, it hasn’t been easy.”
A Day in the Eco-Lodge Life
You could easily stay at Rios and never think about the power supply. Instead, you’d be busy crisscrossing the Pacuare River on an incredible zipline course, taking waterfall hikes, or relaxing in a hammock while listening to the roaring water.
One of my favorite activities was tubing a stretch of river right by the lodge. It’s a bit of a production, involving a safety team that throws you a rope and reels you in before you hit the next set of rapids.
Rafting out was also one of my favorite activities. The rapids were big, and I saw gorgeous tiger herons and tropical cormorants. We stopped for lunch that last day at a picnic shelter crafted by Ariel Allin, an Indigenous host who told us about native building styles. Many people still live traditional lives tucked away in the mountains. It was a treat to meet a person from the Indigenous Cabécar group who serves as a bridge between cultures.
If You Go
Is adventure calling you?
Rios Lodge is open for business year-round. In addition to individual bungalows like the one I stayed in, Rios has a beautiful new eco-hostel with eight rooms each housing eight people. It’s a lot nicer than most of the hostels I’ve stayed in, with comfortable mattresses, individual reading lights, high ceilings, and shelves for personal items. A huge yoga deck makes it attractive for wellness retreats.
As long as you like nature, Rios Lodge is a versatile place where you can have a solo vacation, adventure with a few friends, or even host a 60-person retreat.
The lodge provided the writer with complimentary lodging.
