Bosque Mar gets a fairly good write up in Lonely Planet. I do not recommend staying here. We arrived late and stayed one night before moving the next morning.

I think there might have been a change of ownership, the "on-site" restaurant definitely has changed hands, open only at night.

When we arrived around 8pm on the San Jose bus, there was no obvious place to check in but a guy was hanging around and came up with a piece of paper with "2 gringos 5 Le Tigre". Since my husband had spelled his name in good Spanish to 2 separate people when booking we were somewhat cautious. He then said that all the rooms with A/C are not at the main building, but one block down over a supermarket and both places are the same. Despite our doubts this clearly was the case the next morning when we came to leave.

The room was large, but not very clean. The bathroom was distinctly dirty, and there was no seat on the toilet. The rooms are over the supermarket, and access is through a locked gate and a dark internal corridor. It is not a place to hang out in. There are much better options in PJ for the same price, e.g. Cabinina Jimenez or Marcela.

I was on my way to Carate but missed the evening colectivo and needed a place to stay in Jimenez, as it was already getting dark, so I grabbed a taxi and this is where the driver took me. He told me it was clean and cheap, and so I thought that was fine, and I didn´t want to haul my luggage around town looking for somewhere to stay.

The check in process was easy, the guy at the desk didn´t speak any English but thankfully I had enough Spanish at the time to communicate and we got me all settled in a room upstairs. I had to lug my bags up the stairs myself, the guy didn´t even offer to help me. The room was large with a double and a single bed and a TV but no cable. You could also get movies downstairs if you wanted to, and they had refreshments for sale as well. There was only one tiny window in the room and there were two fans, one above each bed, but when you turned them on they started to shake and rock and vibrate the walls and it made me nervous so I slept without them on.

The price was very cheap--$10 for a night.. but I definitely got what I paid for!! The room appeared clean but I think it was just a tidying up job, and the sheets were questionable, so much so that I used my sleeping bag instead of sleeping on the sheets, and I used my own towels I had brought with me instead of using theirs. In fact, when I got out of the shower (after JUST having washed up), when I walked on the floor I made dirty footprints because the floor was dirty. I ended up actually using their towels on the ground to get from the bathroom to the bed without touching the ground.

All this was fine because of the price but then at about 8:00, music started blaring from a bar next door. It was really loud, and not only that, but you could also hear people laughing and chatting, not ideal when you´re trying to get to sleep. This continued until past midnight, and then shortly thereafter (around 1:30, or 2:00 am) roosters started crowing and continued until I left the hotel at around 4:45 to catch a bus. It was insane! I would never stay there again!