Las Vueltas means the turns and it is the name of the place we the Seelye families live and work and share our life with visitors who wish to stay and learn with us.

The turn seems appropriate to describe how we began this project some thirty years ago when Papa (Ruddy Seelye) and Mama (Maxine Smith) started a family and decided to home school.

Chased out of Michigan by the cold, we traveled to Florida and having heard about Costa Rica from friends decided to visit for a few months ina tropical country. In those days it was cheaper to take a flight to Panama and catch the bus from there to San Jose. So February 4th, 1978 we arrived. Papa, Mama, Martha and me. I was three years old, Martha one, and Mama was five months pregnant with Andy.

This story continues - click here to read more

“We came for a vacation, stayed and made a life.”

Ruddy Seelye

Welcome to the Las Vueltas Lodge

We are a private student lodge on the most northern mountain of the Talamanca range. The lodge is located at 2800 M elevation on a 300-acre forest preserve. We are living in and protecting this virgin highland tropical forest and paramo area. Utilizing small sustainable systems and exploring alternative earth friendly methods in our life style, we hope to be an example of comfortably “walking lightly.” We are developing and using petroleum free energy systems for example a small hydroelectric plant, biogas, solar technology and permaculture. We also have a large garden, 2 cows, various chickens as well as horses which are all a part of our life.

As a parallel project, our sustainable tourism undertaking offers an educational adventure to our student groups and visitors using the earth friendly theme and a comfortable place to experience the cool Costa Rican highlands.

Though we live a simple conservative life style we do not wish to “reinvent the wheel” so we are open to new ideas that give us other safe, enlightening, earth friendly advantage for our lives. Thankfully, our visitors educate us too.

If this interests you please do contact us - we are continuously inspired by the people we meet.