Eco Lodge La Juanita

“Very special place nearly outside of Manizales”

The place it's very beautiful. They have very nice room for rent, small villas, and very nice space to place your tent or just rent one from the front desk. In case it rains they have a shelter for the tents. The view it's amazing, the pool as well. You are surrounded by nature all around, it's ver… more

The place it's very beautiful. They have very nice room for rent, small villas, and very nice space to place your tent or just rent one from the front desk. In case it rains they have a shelter for the tents. The view it's amazing, the pool as well. You are surrounded by nature all around, it's very peaceful. Definitely recommended for tourist or "manizalenos"

less

“Oasis on a mountain”

A beautiful place from where you can explore the coffee region. It's surrounded by hummingbirds and has a pool with natural mineral water from a natural source. It's in the neighbourhood La Linda, just outside Manizales and it's only a ten minute taxidrive away from downtown. The only minus were t… more

A beautiful place from where you can explore the coffee region. It's surrounded by hummingbirds and has a pool with natural mineral water from a natural source. It's in the neighbourhood La Linda, just outside Manizales and it's only a ten minute taxidrive away from downtown. The only minus were the barking dogs at night. The Panoramic views are great!

less

“OK place, not enough eco”

First the positives: it is green (although close to the city), has a friendly staff, it is pretty cheap (100.000/night). The are some negatives: it's old and needs some restauration, there's too much concrete for a eco orientated hotel, they don't serve any meals besides breakfast (everybody calls … more

First the positives: it is green (although close to the city), has a friendly staff, it is pretty cheap (100.000/night). The are some negatives: it's old and needs some restauration, there's too much concrete for a eco orientated hotel, they don't serve any meals besides breakfast (everybody calls take away that comes with loads of plastic and foam boxes). To sum up: OK for it's price, bit outdated, lack of a coherent eco vision.

less

“Great views but overpriced and overrated”

This small family-run hotel sits on a great ridge-top location outside Manizales and is partly located in an original house very typical for this zone. The do allow camping on the property (at COP 25'000 per person), one of the features that made us choose this establishment because we were a group… more

This small family-run hotel sits on a great ridge-top location outside Manizales and is partly located in an original house very typical for this zone. The do allow camping on the property (at COP 25'000 per person), one of the features that made us choose this establishment because we were a group of people, some camping, some in a room. Unfortunately, this is about everything I can come up with on the positive side. For us the trouble started shortly after we had made the reservation via booking.com (and had got a confirmation from booking), when the staff contacted us telling that they were extremely sorry but wouldn't have a room for us on night two of three. Also, they insisted we make a downpayment of half of the total cost *within 24 hours* to their home bank — a thing impossible to do because the request was made late in the afternoon on December 31st and we don't have a Colombian bank account either. After some more back and forth over email and some grumbeling on their part they granted we could pay upon arrival — but cash only. On the final day of our visit we paid via credit card and no-one lost a word about it. The double room we had booked for COP 180'000 (which is extremely expensive for what the double room turned out to be, but Manizales somehow seems to be a high-price island within Colombia; in other cities rooms of this standard would be COP 40'000 to 60'000) turned out to cramped with less than one meter of room around the bed and virtually no other facilities, not even a chair, no coat-hangers in the cupboard, the bed had seen better days and there was no locker for valuable items. The included breakfast was not a cheering affair either: one morning, breakfast consisted of 1 (=one) tiny, dry and essentially tasteless arepa, an equally dry bread roll, 5 small pieces of fruit (pineapple and papaya) and a beverage of our choice (coffee, tea, cocoa). If not for the pot of margarine on each table we would probably have choked on the food. The staff is always described as extremely helpful in other reviews — a thing we cannot confirm. They hardly talked to us (we are fluent in both Spanish and English) and don't consider ourselves hard to talk to, never gave us a proper introduction to the place (we found out about the apparently great walk through their own forest when re-reading other TripAdvisor reviews after our stay), and were extremely terse with other types of information. They did call us a taxi, though. The spa (which we didn't use) and the swimming pool are a steep long stairway down — and subsequently up … — the property (110+ steps) and the water in the pool was icy. The setting of the pool is nice.

less