Canopy Adventure

About us Canopy Adventure.

Our canopy tour adventure is located on a 1400 acre farm in San Jose de la Montaña, just at the foot of the Barva Volcano. A German-Costa Rican Family has owned this farm for over 100 years. This family utilizes this land in a very effective manner. We will find various activities in this farm such as low impact tourism, dairy farm, western cider plantations and a saw mill used for wood processing.

The forest and zip lines

Our 650 acres of primary forest are protected under a program that sells oxygen to the world. This program is sponsored by FUNDECOR and Florida Ice & farm. We work with the highest environmental standards. Our trails are done in a special way to prevent erosion. The platforms and hand rails are made either from scrap wood or wood from the saw mill.

Here at Canopy Adventure we take global warming as a number 1 priority. We thrive in every tour to teach people and create some consciousness about why we have to preserve the forest. The canopy tour itself is thought out to not harm the environment. The zip lining course is set up mainly on old oak trees. The cables surround the tree without touching it, so the tree is not strangled. Platforms hang from large branches instead of screwing them on the tree, this way we can modify the length of platforms while the tree grows freely. The whole course of the zip lines is constructed in a way so we do not have to cut any trees down, thus making it so we work with them and not against them.

The sawmill

Our Sawmill has been running since 1974. The wood harvested is only from the plantation. In this plantation we can find 2 types of trees: cypress wood (cupressus lucitana sp.) and alder wood (alnus acuminate sp.). We only sell wood locally and it’s mainly used to make furniture, flooring and walls. Trees are planted in crops and have a 35 year cycle. When crops are cut down, new trees will fill the gap left, and so on…

The Office

The front desk building is also used as a house for some of the staff members. Due to the altitude (around 7000 feet) we are located in a very cold place. The building is heated with a wooden stove. The stove has a pipe-like chimney that goes all along the sides of the house up to the second floor to eliminate humidity and keep it warm. Our water heating systems are solar and the kitchen runs on propane gas to diminish electric power consumption.

This business is also focused on helping the economy of the community. We usually hire local people and train them to become naturalist guides. The lunch served to our clients is bought from a small local restaurant, very close to our place, where they also cook with a wooden stove.

Being a rural area, education towards recycling is non-existent. Here we store glass, cans, plastic and cardboard to then be driven to INBIO Park. The paper used in our fax machines is also reused, before we recycle it. Organic waste is used to elaborate compost; we use it to enrich the soil for vegetable groves.

Taking care and preserving our resources is an obligation of each one of us, it does not matter how much we can do to help, every action counts.