After our walk through the cloud forest on the hanging bridges and a quick lunch, we ventured into the Butterfly Garden. It’s the largest butterfly garden in Costa Rica from what I remember being told and it was quick incredible. Erin and I both agreed that they should have weddings in there. It kind of reminded me of the giant chocolate garden room in Willy Wonka. It was very warm and humid and there were beautiful butterflies everywhere. It was surreal.

Our guide was wonderful and he took us on a tour of the building, explaining to us the stages of butterflies, how they assist the butterflies along and what they eat, etc. They had these displays of chrysalis’s that we thought were for demonstration purposes until we saw a butterfly start to hatch out of one. It was SO cool! There were hundreds of butterflies in different stages  of development all waiting to hatch. I’ve never seen anything like it. All throughout the garden we saw hundreds of butterflies of all shapes and colors. All of our favorites were the Blue Morphos. Beautiful.

After the butterfly garden, we ventured into the insect displays. Thankfully, they were not alive in this garden.. FREAKY. All kinds of bugs, scorpions, beetles, spiders, flying creatures.. you name it, they had them. This was not Erin’s favorite room 🙂

Post insects, we ventured into the humming bird garden before heading back to Monte Verde. Once again, there were hundreds of humming birds feeding on dozens of feeders. Colors like you’ve never seen. They were beautiful birds. Humming birds are fascinating to me because of their speed and grace. They would buzz by your head at 50 mph and miss you by inches.

Here are a few pix.