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Butterfly Garden

Enjoy the charm, color and beauty of nature in our Butterfly Garden, a small rainforest paradise with an exquisite selection of Costa Rican butterflies, including the Blue Morpho, one of the icons of the rainforest. So you can be one with nature, and make your Costa Rican vacation naturally harmonious, learning at the same time about the world’s most beautiful butterflies.

Butterflies are major pollination agents in the forest. The diverse patterns formed by their brightly colored wings and their erratic, yet graceful, flight have also made butterfly watching a popular hobby and the Butterfly Garden a tourist attraction of the rainforest.

Endowed with strong mandibles, the caterpillar can be considered as a many-legged stomach that feeds, feeds and feeds... with the only purpose of growing. But butterfly larvae also feature a wide variety of defenses against predators that feed on them (insects, frogs, birds or monkeys), such as irritant spines or hairs, which have toxins that make them a noxious mouthful. They can also disguise themselves by mimicking the appearance of non-edible or dangerous species. That's the case of the Toas Swallowtail Butterfly (Heraclides thoas) caterpillar, whose bird-dropping disguise is enhanced by its habit of resting on the upper side of leaves. Other camouflage protection helps butterfly larvae blend with their background.

Protection against predators also exists in adult butterflies: they can use camouflage (as the Blue Morpho butterfly does while resting, because the lower side of its wings blends well with trunk and rock surfaces), or advertise their presence by mimicking the bright coloring of more dangerous species, even unrelated ones.

Adult butterflies consume liquids only, which they suck by means of their proboscis. This they do for water, for energy from the sugars in found nectar and for sodium and other minerals that are vital for their reproduction. Although butterflies feed primarily on nectar from flowers, important nourishment is also obtained sipping water from damp patches as well as from the ingestion of tree sap, rotting fruit, dung and minerals dissolved in wet sand or mud.

Scale covering is one of the main characteristics of the butterfly’s wings. Indeed, the astonishing blues, greens, reds and iridescent hues that decorate their wings are created through the most extraordinary demonstration of optical physics in a living creature. They are not created by pigments but are the result of coherent scattering of light by the crystal microstructure of their scales.

Don't forget that after an intense and active tour day you can relax in the hotel’s natural hot springs and enjoy the health and beauty of our Fangus Spa.