On a clifftop in Arenal, a luxury camp sits inside a rainforest its owners replanted from bare cattle land. You might go for the hot-spring plunge pool with volcano backdrop. You'll remember it for the sloth friends you meet during your stay. Nayara Tented Camp in Costa Rica is the first nature immersion featured in our Well Stayed series.

‍

At dawn the canopy below the camp is loud with birdsong, and somewhere in the Guarumo trees a sloth is doing what sloths do, which is almost nothing, very slowly. The volcano stands across the valley. The rainforest falls away beneath your deck. None of it was there a generation ago. The hillside had been stripped for cattle ranching and left bare for decades. The forest you wake up in at Nayara Tented Camp was planted on purpose, tree by tree, and it worked. The birds, the monkeys, the sloths all came back and took up residency within the canopy. This Tented Camp may be the rare luxury hotel whose finest feature is the forest it brought back to life.

‍

The camp sits on a clifftop inside Arenal Volcano National Park, near the town of La Fortuna, with the volcano rising across the valley and the rainforest dropping away below. It is part of Nayara Resorts, a Costa Rican family of hotels that also includes the neighboring Nayara Gardens and Nayara Springs. When it opened in 2019, it was the first luxury tented camp in Central America. Condé Nast Traveler named it among the best sustainable hotels in the world, and the AHEAD Awards called its design a new concept of luxury.

Stay

There are 29 tents here, and calling them tents undersells them by a wide margin. Each is a canvas-and-timber structure raised on stilts, partly so the views carry over the treetops and partly so the forest floor underneath stays undisturbed and wildlife can pass through. Inside, each runs roughly 1,500 square feet, with a four-poster bed, wooden floors, an oversized tub, and both indoor and outdoor showers. Outside, on a private deck, sits a plunge pool fed by the area's natural mineral hot springs. You can soak in warm volcanic water with the rainforest in front of you and, if the morning cooperates, a toucan within earshot.

‍

The tents come in a few forms. The standard Nayara Tent suits a couple or a small family. Twelve of the tents are mirror-image pairs that connect into two-bedroom family suites, sharing a deck and pool. The Grand Tents add an oversized infinity pool angled straight at the volcano, along with a full kitchen and indoor and outdoor lounges. At the top of the range are the two Private Residences, Casa Paloma and Casa Dana, each combining several tents around a villa with a fire pit, a kitchen, an infinity pool, and a personal concierge. Whatever the category, the touches are genuine: turndown comes with locally made chocolates, and breakfast can be brought to your deck.

Eat

Nayara's kitchens run on a philosophy they call Cero Kilómetros, the aim being as little distance as possible between the farm and the plate, with local producers doing most of the supplying. Because the three Nayara properties share a campus, guests at the Tented Camp can eat across all of them, which means a different restaurant most nights.

‍

Ayla, the camp's own restaurant, is set in an elegant tent with views of the infinity pool and the volcano. Led by Beirut-born chef Mohamed Ternanni, it leans modern Mediterranean with a Middle Eastern touch, and Henry's Bar sits next door with a fireplace and a library. Down on the sister properties, Amor Loco is the adults-only fine-dining room at Nayara Springs, a Relais & Châteaux property, intimate and a little theatrical, the right call for a special night. Asia Luna works a Costa Rican-Asian fusion, where the dishes to order are the Nayara Roll, made with sweet plantains and chicken, and the grilled yellowfin tuna. There is also open-air dining at La Terraza del Arenal with the volcano in view, a wine bar, a coffee-roasting bar, and easygoing options for when you would rather not leave the pool.

Relax

The spa is built into pockets of the rainforest, so treatments happen in open-air pavilions with the forest as the soundtrack. The therapists work with what grows nearby, using locally grown organic coffee, chocolate, and volcanic mud in the scrubs and wraps. There is yoga in the trees, held on a platform where the view does much of the work for you. This is wellness in the plain sense the Well Stayed series looks for, less about a product line and more about being somewhere your nervous system settles on its own.

Explore

Arenal is one of Costa Rica's great adventure hubs, and the concierge can arrange most of it. The classic outings are the Mistico Hanging Bridges, best walked early before the crowds and the midday cloud, and the La Fortuna Waterfall, where you can swim in the pool beneath the falls. There are guided volcano hikes over old lava fields, white-water rafting on the Sarapiquí River, zip-lining across the canopy, and after-dark walks in search of the translucent glass frogs.

‍

The wildlife, though, is the headline, and it does not require a booking. Every stay begins with an in-house naturalist guide who will point out what most guests would walk straight past. The resident celebrity is Tony, a three-toed sloth who tends to hang near the reception area and has been written up by name in both Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler. Ask the team where he was last spotted. Better still, take the naturalist walk at dawn, when the animals are most active and the forest is at full volume.

Sustain

It would be easy to file the green credentials under marketing. Here they are the founding idea, and they are unusually concrete.

‍

Start with the land itself. The mountainside the resort sits on had been deforested by cattle farmers for more than fifty years. Nayara bought the mountain with the goal of bringing the rainforest back, and brought in landscape architect Matthew Flynn of Vida Design Studio to oversee the planting of thousands of trees across the slope. In the years since, the forest has grown back healthily enough to form a natural wildlife corridor, drawing back sloths and howler monkeys, and, the resort reports, even the occasional jaguar. As part of that effort the property was planted with more than a thousand cecropia trees, the sloth's main food source, and now serves as a sanctuary to around twenty of them.

‍

The building followed the same logic. The tents were raised on stilts to avoid grading the land, the flooring is FSC-certified, and the design preserved the property's heritage trees, work that earned the camp its AHEAD design award. Nayara's Costa Rica resorts are certified carbon neutral by the independent sustainability firm EcoQualis. Single-use plastic is hard to find: water comes in reusable glass bottles, with aluminum for off-site excursions, and the toiletries are in refillable ceramic containers, with no plastic straws or cups in sight.

‍

The commitment runs to people as much as trees. Most of the team comes from neighboring La Fortuna, and Nayara provides free transport, sustainable-tourism training, and early childhood education for employees' children. The most striking initiative is newer: a partnership with a local bank that lets employees take ownership of a home in a new community being built for them, starting a mortgage with no down payment and building equity from day one. The house is theirs to keep even if they leave the job. For a luxury resort, it is an unusually direct answer to the question of who a place is really for.

‍

Costa Rica protects roughly a quarter of its land, far more than almost anywhere, and Nayara reads like a small, private extension of that national habit.

‍

‍

Why go

You go to Nayara Tented Camp for the combination it pulls off: a genuinely comfortable bed and a hot-spring soak with five-star service, set inside a forest the owners rebuilt from a cattle field. You go to watch a sloth move through trees that were planted on purpose, to fall asleep to frogs, and to wake to a volcano. It is luxury that leaves the place better than it found it, which is the version worth traveling for.

The Details

Nayara Tented Camp
Arenal Volcano National Park, La Fortuna de San Carlos, Costa Rica

Reservations: +506 2479 1600 · US toll-free: +1 844 865 2002 · UK: +44 020 7078 4060

Website: nayaratentedcamp.com · Social: @nayaratentedcamp

Good to know: Part of Nayara Resorts, so guests may dine across Nayara Gardens and Nayara Springs. Member of Leading Hotels of the World. About a 2.5 to 3 hour drive from San Jose International Airport (SJO), or a short charter flight to La Fortuna.

When to go: Dry season runs roughly December through April. The green season brings more rain, lower rates, and fewer crowds, and the forest is at its most alive when it rains.

‍

WCG Category: Well Stayed | Nature Immersion

Well City insider tips

• Ask for a tent higher on the ridge for the clearest volcano views. If the budget allows, a Grand Tent or a Residence buys you the infinity pool that faces Arenal directly.
• The volcano usually shows itself early and clouds over by midday. Plan your photos, your hikes, and the hanging bridges for first light.
• Take the naturalist walk at dawn and ask where Tony was last seen. The animals are most active early, and the forest is loudest then.
• Soak the hot-spring plunge pool at dusk, when the frog chorus starts up. It is the most Costa Rican sound there is.
• Because you can dine across all three Nayara properties, spread your dinners around, and book Amor Loco (adults only) ahead for a romantic night.
• Pack for rainforest: light layers that dry fast, a packable rain shell, reef-safe sunscreen, closed walking shoes, and binoculars.
• Build in a buffer day. La Fortuna is about a three-hour drive from San Jose, and you will not want the visit to feel rushed.

‍

Well Stayed is a Well City Guide series on hotels and resorts where wellness is the foundation, not a footnote. Nayara Tented Camp is the latest.

‍

Photography courtesy of Nayara Resorts.