Hotel Three Sixty, Costa Rica: A Rainforest Hideaway Where the View Is the Star!
- Kelli Hunter
- 1 hour ago
- 7 min read
Discover a real-world Garden of Eden while enjoying world-class tequila, rainforest hikes, and stunning infinity pool sunsets.
By: Kelli Hunter/TravelAnne Staff Writer
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A Costa Rican jungle vacation has a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, and quickly at that. Some travelers arrive with dreams of shiny, frictionless comfort — only to tuck tail when the rainforest insists on reminding them that it is a living, breathing ecosystem that has its own business to attend to. Even others fall hard for the wildness: the nightly drumbeat of rain, the neon green canopy, the uninvited cameo from an occasional insect or two and that we’re tucked into nature’s front row, rather than a well-manicured postcard.
Hotel Three Sixty is going to cater unapologetically to that second group. It doesn’t try to civilize the jungle. It just provides you with a gorgeous, grown-up basecamp from which to watch it go.
Built on a private 58-acre rainforest reserve, just underneath 1000 feet above the Pacific Puntarenas coastline along Costa Rica’s South Pacific coast, is Hotel Three Sixty—adults-only and intimate with only a dozen villas: small in size, big on atmosphere. The name is not poetic license: the vistas are genuinely panoramic — a sweep of green rolling toward a ribbon of Pacific blue; silver at dusk.
When the Forest Parts Like a Curtain
Visiting Hotel Three Sixty is one of the stories. The South Pacific coast has long served as a more subdued counterpart to Costa Rica’s active beach hubs, and traveling here can feel intentionally “earned.” You twist through thick greenery, ascending into cooler air, until the property suddenly appears, as though it has unspooled before you like a backdrop — an open-air arrival that frames the coastline with cinematic purpose.
In the middle is a dry courtyard: there’s a bed of polished stones inside it — minimalist, serene, nearly meditational. And then there are changes in the weather, because that’s what weather does, and everything becomes different: Rain makes those stones into a living fountain; petrichor fills the air; it feels as if the whole place is breathing. Surrounding this hub are the social anchors: the curving infinity pool, Kua Kua restaurant and Bar 360 —all arranged purposefully so that almost every angle is a testament to the rainforest and ocean.
It’s an architectural thesis statement: the hotel is there to frame the landscape, not battle it.
The Villas: Tropical-Modern Comfort, With the Terrace as Headliner
Paths lead from the central hub to freestanding villas that list tropical-modern rather than rustic, their floor-to-ceiling sliding doors dissolving into your terrace. Bathrooms feature outdoor showers that bring the forest up to the edge of your morning routine — bracing, but quietly surreal.
Rooms are generous, thoughtfully fitted out, and graced with the type of air-conditioning that you’ll be grateful for after a long day at the beach. The beds are a firm invitation — for hikiny sleep and lingering mornings.
But the true luxury here is the terrace. Hotel Three Sixty effectively argue that the world’s best suite is irrelevant if it doesn’t transplant you into where you are. You’ll find your best hours will be spent outside: watching mist creep through the canopy, listening to frogs and cicadas or scanning the treeline for a flash of movement that may be a toucan — or something more roguish.
Breakfast delivered to your terrace is the clincher: fresh juice, coconut water, properly-cooked eggs, fruit-laden French toast and decent Costa Rican coffee — all with a jungle soundtrack provided as standard. This is the kind of morning that causes you to forget what a “schedule” even is.
The Pool:A Front-Row seat to the Best Light Show in Costa Rica
If Hotel Three Sixty boasts a signature “postcard moment,” it’s the infinity pool. It wraps the edge of the main building in a way that alters your perspective as you move — swim a few strokes here and there, and the view changes, a slow pan on a documentary landscape. And the pool is another true escape from the “torrid jungle heat,” as the original article puts it, and where hours slip by pleasantly: cocktails in hand, rainforest below, Pacific beyond.
At sunset, the scene goes theatrical. The water turns into a mirror; the sky gets painterly. And as the property is adults-only and intimate, the vibe keeps mellow — more “quiet awe” than “pool party.”
Dining: Kua Kua and Bar 360,Where the Details Matter
Jungle hotels can be a bit rough and ready when it comes to dining: an annoying necessity rather than the sort of experience you might want to prolong. Hotel Three Sixty is not one of those places.
The culinary locus is Kua Kua (“butterfly” in the local Boruca language), and the menu shifts with assuredness through modes: sushi for when you crave something clean and bright, comfort food (read: fried chicken sandwiches) of a sort that doesn’t make much sense in Costa Rica, or indeed most other places, and cuisine from here — but not that kind. Case in point: oven-baked whole snapper, accompanied by patacones (smashed and fried green plantains) and a Caribbean-style Costa Rican sauce — exactly the plate you’re begging for after a salt-and-sun day.
And then there’s Bar 360, which knows what it means to have a good bar in the middle of nowhere. It’s the room where sunset feels ritual, and where the back bar is a sotto voce announcement that yes, this team is serious — right down to stocking a hard-to-find tequila like Cascahuín Tahona Blanco.
The Wildlife: The Most Memorable “Amenity”
This is the thing: somewhere like this, the rainforest isn’t scenery — it’s the headline.
From here, you’re looking out over areas that include Manuel Antonio’s celebrated beaches and down to the Osa Peninsula, where some of Earth’s biodiversity bubbles. And the wildlife comes to you without your having to be too intrepid. The article mentions yellow-throated toucans who will come to rest astonishingly close, and capuchin monkeys gliding through the surrounding trees with a theatrical agility — moments that feel both completely mundane (to them) and electric (to you).
The hotel has leaned into this by teaming up with Swarovski Optik and providing binoculars so guests can better enjoy the details — feathers, movement, color, that subtle flash in the canopy you’d otherwise miss — a smart, simple enhancement that makes the property feel even more immersive.
Off-site: Beaches, Sea Caves, and the “Whale Tail” of Costa Rica
And as transporting as the mountaintop setting is, the Hotel Three Sixty truly clicks when you’re not in it — because the South Pacific coast below here is quietly extraordinary.
Minutes’ descent takes you to Ojochal’s beaches: Playa Tortuga for tide pools, Playa Piñuela for easy swims and Playa Ventanas — where jungle dips down onto sand pocked with sea caves that “sigh open with the tide.” It’s close enough for a mad dash to the beach (a 15-minute drive), and far away so that its soundtrack is birds and breezes instead of beach traffic.
And then there’s the jewel of the area: Parque Nacional Marino Ballena, home to the famous “Tail of the Whale,” a sand-and-rock formation visible at low tide that disappears with high tide. Walking it feels like being part of a natural event — you are out in the sea and then the next thing you know, the sea obliterates that path. It’s the kind of place that makes you get why tourists are drawn to Costa Rica for wonder rather than perfection.
The Philosophy: “Authentic, Laid-Back Luxury”
Hotel Three Sixty’s aesthetic is very much the work of its founder Trevor Ling - an English ex-pat who re-created himself several years ago from a career in wealth management to hotelier – and also investor friends, with whom he opened here in 2017/18. He calls the ethos “authentic, laid-back luxury” — which gets expressed in adult-minded quiet, intimate scale and a staff that “will arrive if you need them and just kind of meld away into the ferns” when you don’t.
That said, the property isn’t attempting to emulate a sterile wellness monastery. It’s comfortable and sophisticated, yes, but still unmistakably Costa Rica: dramatic thunderstorms in the distance, humid air and a feeling that nature has dominion over all.
Sustainability: Thoughtful, Not Perfect
The hotel also practices sustainability on a material level: with a built footprint that makes up less than 8% of the land, eco-forward toiletries from Costa Rican brand RAW Botanicals, sourcing local ingredients and planting a tree for each guest night in partnership with One Tree Planted. The article makes mention of a reliance on single-use plastics, explaining the practical reality that recycling infrastructure can be tricky to guarantee for an area such as this — it is a refreshingly honest and imperfect reality check that many remote cities face.
Who Should Go (and Who Shouldn’t)
Go if:
You’re after an adult-only, romantic jungle getaway that offers actual peace and quiet.
Amenities are important to you, but so are views and an atmosphere.
You’re looking for a vacation that includes some rainforest time and is convenient to beaches and Marino Ballena.
Skip it if:
Or at least, you need a programmed-to-the-minute resort with an activity each hour.
You don’t like heat, humidity, rain or the occasional “the jungle is a little too close” experience. (This is nature-forward luxury, not bubble-wrapped luxury.
The Bottom Line
Hotel Three Sixty is more interested in the luxuriousness of a place than the flashy kind: How a view can shut that part of your brain off, how even an unhurried breakfast feels cinematic in the rain forest, how into-silence-a-conversation-ending sunset. It's a boutique hotel that knows its place: keep out of the way, do those comfort pieces well, and let Costa Rica's remote South Pacific wilderness work its magic.
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