We greatly enjoyed our stay at Casa Alma. It is not easy finding a place that can satisfy six adults at various life stages, as well as a one year old toddler, but this house did it!
PROS: We loved how non-busy the beach was in the mornings and evenings. It gave us lots of room for beautiful pictures and space for our toddler to run and splash in the shallow waves. While it isn’t a good beach for swimming, it is the perfect beach for walking, sunsets, shell hunting, and watching surfers. Having the option for the private pool was great for those that wanted to stick around the house, but our group also really enjoyed the community pool with swim up bar as well. Marco, the property manager, was very attentive and helped us with any issues that we had come up with our stay. Alvaro, the gardener, was extremely friendly and provided us fresh coconuts and bananas for our stay! All in all, the people that we encountered were the BEST and really wanted to make our stay as great as possible. Debbie and Bob were very quick to respond in the lead up to our trip and also had some great recommendations and information at the house to help us plan for restaurants and activities throughout the week.
CONS: It is a vacation home (not a resort), so there were certainly times where there were some inconveniences that were outside of our control (or the control of Debbie and Bob). For example, it is a duplex type set up where there are two separate residences in a shared house. One of our nights in the house, the other resident was housing dogs that barked throughout the entire night. We also had a power outage for one of the mornings, which was a problem for those in our party who appreciated the A/C and wifi, and also made it difficult to get in contact with Marco. If you can survive some of these inconveniences, this is a great place to stay!
In general, our week here went fast and it would have been great to have stretched it out longer. There is a lot to do and see in the area, and we feel as if we barely scratched the surface. Highly recommend making time to go to Manual Antonio for wildlife sightings and the beautiful beach (though do your research first!), as well as Rainmaker for some cool hiking.