community

Cabañas San Isidro maintains a vital role as one of the front-runners on Ecuador 's east-slope with respect to tying together land acquisition and protection projects, serious biological research, community involvement and world-class nature tourism in one of the most ecologically sensitive and important zones that the country has to offer.

San Isidro Lodge is the major nexus in the Cosanga Valley that links the Antisana and Gran Sumaco Reserves by way of a wide and splendid flat montane forest reserve; flat forests in the Andes these days are hard to come by since much of this habitat type has been converted into pasture.

More recently San Isidro has worked closely with Biocomercio and GIZ to help make the reserve more sustainable through community projects designed to benefit everybody involved. The goal is that the lodge, the locals, and the forest can forge a relationship that benefits everybody, leaving the smallest ecological footprint possible.

The key to the real success of any conservation or tourism project is community involvement. San Isidro employs locals from the nearby towns, which in turn serves as an on-the-job training process in many fields, from meal preparation and hotel operation, to naturalist and

bird guiding.

Cabañas San Isidro - with strong support from Biocomercio and GIZ - has been developing various projects to help reinforce its 1,900 hectare ecological corridor over the past year through various projects; the keynote project being the creation of an interpretive trail on a portion of the reserve. The primary goal of the trail is accessible environmental education, to be made available to many groups, such as local school groups, and Ecuadorian and foreign tourists alike.

Another equally important goal of the project includes indepth, multi-faceted training courses based at the lodge that involve not only the employees of the lodge, but also anybody from the surrounding communities. By hiring professionals such as chefs, bilingual naturalist and birding guides, artisans, the participants have the opportunity to learn from the best in their fields, giving them eco-friendly, alternative ways of making a living while raising their standard of life. Having also sponsored several training courses specialized in guiding, some of Ecuador's best known local guides have emerged from such efforts in recent years.

It is our hope that these projects will work in symphony and offer important tools that increase the overall awareness level with respect to the need for conservation in the zone, as well as raise the living and service standards of the locals. At San Isidro, there has already been a noticeable and fresh change in the all of these areas.

logos aso

With the aim of making the reserve accessible to high school and university level student groups, as well as independent researchers working on specific graduate level projects, we offer our field station facilities at a special rate. The reserve has some of the most accessible and well-preserved forest in the Andean subtropics.

We recieve a wide range of student groups; some come with their own projects and activities in mind, while others are less scientific and prefer to help out with one of the lodge´s projects in progress, such as camera trap monitoring or hummingbird survey counts, reforestation with native (hardwood) trees, and community educational programs in a wide range of fields, incluiding classes in English, techniques in guiding, gastronomy, and environmental awareness. Others simply prefer to hike the forest with one of our interpretative guides to learn more about the cloud forest and its inhabitants. Just let us know and we can plan accordingly.

Please contact us for special student group rates, for additional information, and availability.

Student groups & conservation

Area Attractions

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