Santarena Hotel

A 45-room beach hotel on Playa Danta in Las Catalinas, a car-free town in Guanacaste, with a rooftop pool and Ponciana, a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant.

Santarena Hotel stands on Playa Danta in Las Catalinas, a car-free town on the Guanacaste coast. Guests leave the car with the valet at the Plaza Central building and get around town on foot.

The hotel has 45 rooms, all with king beds and sustainable wood floors, and most have a private balcony laid with handmade Cuban-style pressed tiles. The top-floor Ocean View Suite and the corner Almendro Suite are the largest rooms at 602 sq ft. The Ocean View Suite has two balconies, one facing the sea and one the hills, and the Almendro Suite looks over Plaza Danta. The bathrooms stock Biosfera toiletries, made in Costa Rica with rainwater.

Ponciana, the restaurant and bar, cooks Mediterranean-inspired dishes with Costa Rican ingredients from the sea, the mountains and local farms. The rooftop pool faces west over the Pacific. Guests can use the gym, the tennis and pickleball courts and the daily wellness classes, and more than 40 km of trails start in town.

Liberia International Airport is roughly an hour to an hour and a half away, on the 4WD Monkey Trail or the paved road through Belén. The hotel can arrange a car or a helicopter.