Arte Aventura Eco- Hotel — Hotel in Bolívar

This place on Isla Grande in the Rosario islands was a good find with wonderful hospitality by Viviana and Carlos. At short notice, it was the cheapest private accommodation we could find online. Our room was clean and comfortable with a fan by the beds, a nice touch but the sea breeze was enough anyway. The beds have mosquito nets but again the breeze helped deter them. You shower with a bucket of water and same with flushing toilets, but it was pleasant enough in the heat and circumstances. This is island life after all! The kitchen is good and necessary with food and drink expensive on the island. The kitchen has rules on certain hours that you can use it so ask at beginning of your stay. The best bit is the hostel is located next to the sea, a minutes walk from a small beach with a pier (fun to jump off) which had really good snorkeling when we were there. My best advice is bring water shoes if you have them as alot of the seafloor is not sandy as you might imagine and I got stung by something on the ground plus there can be sharp bits of broken coral on the ground so water shoes are very useful. Playa Libre is 10 minutes walk away which is a really nice sandy beach and our favourite that we visited. Come here either before 10am or after 3pm, to set your hours to when the day trippers have left. It is much nicer! And that advice works for the whole island. The place is amazing when all the day trippers and most beach vendors are gone with brilliant sunsets and wonderful sounds at night. Plus you can visit a lake where you can snorkel and see the phosphorescent plankton that glow at night! These are the reasons that you should stay a...

We had a private room, with private bathroom, at Arte y Aventura.||After having arrived by speedboat to Isla Grande, a guide took us to the hostel. We were looking for an authentic island experience - we came to the right place.||The hostel has no running water or electricity. There were car batteries that powered a small bedside fan. Showering involved pouring a jug of fresh water over yourself, and flushing the toilet involved dumping a bucket of sea water down the toilet.||Our room came with a mosquito net, which we later found out was definitely a necessity. When we woke up, the net was covered in hundreds of mosquitoes which was pretty terrifying. This was probably brought on by the slight downpour the previous evening. We had brought our insect repellent into the net, so we could leave the net safely.||Breakfast (traditional Colombian) is available upon request. However, for other meals you’ll have to go to one of the restaurants on the island. As there is no electricity on the island, getting back to the hostel can be pretty difficult in the pitch black, even with torches. We got lost is the dark, but were luckily found by a local who guided us back.||The lady who owns the hostel can speak both Spanish and English. She is very helpful for booking all the tours you would want to go on (snorkelling, mangroves, Enchanted Lagoon).||Say hi to her son who plays all-day, every-day in the...

We stayed here for a couple of days in a private bungalow, which is a quirky hut with a straw roof. The room itself was a perfect size, had a comfortable bed and a toilet and shower area. There is no running water so buckets of fresh and salt water are provided for showering and flushing the loo. This is fine, but it makes it a bit difficult to brush your teeth or wash your face etc as you don’t have enough hands to use the bucket at the same time. At the other side of the garden there is a separate toilet, outside of which is a sink with a bucket of water with a tap at the bottom; this would be perfect in the rooms and would make it much easier. Our only other suggestion would be mosquito nets above the beds. There are nets over the windows, but as they are straw roofed huts there are plenty of holes for mosquitos to enter and we got numerous bites overnight. ||||The owners/staff are super friendly and helpful, and suggested which beaches to go to and where to eat. They also organised our boat transport for us which was great. We love that they are using solar energy while everyone else on the island seems to be using some huge noisy generators. There is a beautiful tiny beach just a few steps away from this place, which is so underrated- we could have spent all of our time there watching the sunsets and the boats go past!||||We would definitely...