The highest tier of Costa Rica's Certificación para la Sostenibilidad Turística.
Costa Rica's CST grades lodging businesses on a 0–5 leaf scale across natural environment, cultural environment, socio-economic impact, and service quality. Tree House Lodge has held the 5-leaf rating — the highest awarded — since 2008. Here's what that looks like day-to-day.
What the CST actually measures
The CST — Certificación para la Sostenibilidad Turística — is the Costa Rican Tourism Board's (ICT) national certification, built to separate tourism businesses that genuinely manage their natural, cultural, and social impact from ones that just advertise it. Independent evaluators score how a lodge handles energy, water, and waste, how it protects the flora and fauna around it, and how it involves guests and the local community in all of the above. The five-leaf tier we hold is the scale's highest, and it has stayed rare: in 2016, only 49 of the 231 hotels in the programme held all five leaves.
More about the CST programme (ICT) ↗
Solar hot water across every house
All seven houses run on solar-thermal hot water and on-grid electricity from Costa Rica's national grid — already 98%+ renewable, mostly hydro + wind + geothermal. EV charging is on-site and included with every stay.
No insecticide, no pool, no waste
Zero insecticide across the ten acres — we live with the mosquitoes the same way our guests do, with nets and screens. No shared pool by choice: we sit on 300 metres of Punta Uva beach, the safest swimming on the southern Caribbean. Greywater goes to the gardens.
10 acres of native botanical garden
Fifty-plus species of palm, the largest Heliconia collection in the area, and a Sangrillo, almond and Cecropia canopy that we plant into — not out of. Howler monkeys, three-toed sloths, toucans, hummingbirds, raccoons, kinkajous, iguanas. We feed nothing, fence nothing in.
Iguanaverde green-iguana reserve
The Iguanaverde Foundation is on our property. We raise juvenile green iguanas and release them back into the refuge every year, contributing to the wider Refugio Nacional Gandoca-Manzanillo's iguana recovery work.
Hand-built, local, slow
Every house was built on-site, by hand, with materials sourced as close as we could get them. Nispero (fallen loquat trees) for the Beach House; bamboo (Guadua aculeata, the structural giant) for the Garden House; recycled glass bottles and old wheelbarrow tyres for the Crystal House; an actual 1980-era American school bus for, well, the bus.
Family-owned, family-staffed
Independent and family-owned since 1997 — no chain affiliation, no parent company. A local Talamanca team across reception, housekeeping, and grounds.
Beyond the lodge
The thinking doesn't stop at the property line. Three sister projects carry the same low-impact ideas into the wider Talamanca coast.
Bio Caribe — a sister residential development in the forest a few minutes inland from Punta Uva, planned around the same principle as the lodge: keep most of the land as standing forest and let the homes fit in around it. It runs as its own project, with details at biocaribecostarica.com.
Beyond Organic — a sister growing project raising rare, locally sourced produce in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca.
Iguana Verde Foundation — the conservation foundation on our own land, breeding and releasing the endangered green iguana back into the Gandoca-Manzanillo wildlife refuge. Guests can visit — see our Iguana Verde page.