Name: Plaza Royal Apartments
Address: 1.2 Km Norte de Cruces de Santa Teresa, Manzanillo, Manzanillo, Manzanillo, 60111, Costa Rica
Rating: 9

Air conditioning

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Tambor Airport

Chacarita Airport

Plaza Royal Apartments

Manzanillo

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Good location, comfortable  clean place, great housekeeping. Excellent cafe downstairs from the building, small supermarket and restaurants nearby, bus station in front of building.  Close acces to beach. Very much enjoyed my stay at plaza Royal.

Great location

The hostess was really welcoming and helpful.
the Apt was clean and the location is great - a walk to the beach, just in the center next to the supermarket and above a nice coffee shop.
Much recommended!

Perfect place to stay!

I’ve been staying at Plaza Royal for several years as I visit Santa Teresa every winter, and I have never been disappointed. The apartments are beautiful; fresh, clean, safe and well taken care of. If we ever had any questions or inquiries, the staff fixes it fast and they are easy to get in contact with and always keen to help. The apartments are in a great spot as well, on the other side of the road there’s a supermarket and best of all: it’s basically on the beach (and with basically, I mean a 1 minute walk to the sand).

I can’t recommend this place enough. Enjoy! 

Excellent stay!!

The location is awesome -> in front of the house are some restaurants which play some chill Music during the day, in back is the beach (2 Minute walk).

Also the pictures are very acurate and we even have a daily cleaner coming around each day to switch the towels and do the bed.

The shower has a low pressure, but at least you can change the temperature.

Although the room would have an AC, it's naturally fresh in here, so we barely use it.

I am very happy with this place.

Perfect place

The location of this place is good. 
300m from the beach.
In the front of the apartments you can find a coffe shop, restaurants and supermarket. 
The apartments are cleaned every day, which is very important. 
My staying was pleasant.

Plaza royal apartments

Plaza Royal Apartments have a few apartments on the second level of the Plaza Royal shopping strip. The location is pretty good, about 1 km north of the Crossroads, which is the intersection of the main Santa Teresa road and the road from Cabuya. Beach access is also right there, only about 150 meters. However, the main road is fairly busy much of the day, and since it a dirt/gravel road, it often has a foggy appearance with dust. Lots of people rent 4-wheelers and motor bikes and you’ll often see them with goggles, dust masks and/or bandanas on their faces. This also means that the apartment can be on the noisy side, although it is pretty easy to get used to. In the evening, the music from the bar across the street can be fairly loud, but it seems like they stop pretty much at 10 pm (they also have their own cabins). The apartment includes free WiFi, which is good because even though we have an international plan on our phones and we had a strong cell signal, it was extremely rare for us to get data (e.g., 3G or LTE). When we were more north the previous year, we had fairly reliable cell data everywhere.

The apartment has a single bedroom and the couches could also sleep 2 more, but it is really meant just for 2 people. The kitchen area has a 3-burner electric stove, and there is a tea kettle, a few pots and pans, plus dishes and cutlery. If you want to cook, you’ll need to purchase everything, including spices. As mentioned in other reviews, there is no coffee maker, but you can get an inexpensive Tico style system at the grocery store. The main kitchen knife wasn’t very sharp, so we used a multi-tool knife for some things. There are some wooden utensils, but no spatula, so eggs over easy was not an option. There is an oven, but our unit didn’t have a baking pan so the oven didn't get used. While there is a kitchen sponge and cleaning paste for dishes, no soap or other toiletries (e.g., shampoo) are provided, so you will either want to bring them or buy them right away when you get there. The super market across the street has everything you need, and it is open until 10 pm (most if not every night). 

For meals, we ate out once or twice a day, and meals “at home” were fruits and veggies for lunch, scrambled eggs with potatoes and peppers for breakfast, and chicken or fish with potatoes, beans or carrots for dinner. The marinated chicken at the super market across the street was pretty good. For seafood, the best place is probably the Product C market at the CrossRoads shopping plaza (see separate review). For fruits, the bananas and watermelon were excellent when we were there, and every super market had them. Papaya was also good, but it was sometimes over or under ripe, so harder to get just right. Mangoes were very good. If you like passion fruit (maracuya in Spanish), there are 2 kinds in the store. One is a bit smaller, but still bigger than what you would find in the US. It weighs almost nothing, and has very little actual fruit inside (similar to what you get in the US). The other is a bit bigger, about the size of a tennis ball, and is significantly heavier, about 250 g each. When you cut these open, they are filled with very tasty fruit, about 3-4 times as much as the passion fruit I’ve had in the US and Australia.

There are also 2 types of coconuts. Smaller ones are better for coconut water, and the bigger ones (buy at Green World market) are better for eating. A multi-tool or pocket knife is good for opening up them up and scooping out the meat. On one end of the coconut are 3 dark spots where the shell is thinner. Using the can opener on the tool, poke through at least 2 of the spots. Use a screwdriver tool to poke all the way into the water and twist to create a nice hole. You can drain the water into a glass or dump it (it can have a laxative effect, so I just dumped it). I then went outside and found a big rock to bash the coconut into, cracking the shell into halves or quarters. The screwdriver can help you pry the sections apart, and then pry out the meat in large chunks. You can also use a pocket knife for that, but I think the screwdriver is probably safer. It is well worth the effort because the coconut is delicious.

The beach is primarily a surf beach, and the waves can get quite big, especially when the tide is coming in. At the full moon, there was about a 4 m difference between high and low tide, so you can go from having very little beach to tens of meters. For surfing, you probably want to go a bit south towards the Crossroads, or a bit north towards Playa Hermosa. On both of those beaches, you can walk out a long ways because of the shallow slope and you get 2 surf breaks. The outer break can have waves of up to about 3 m, and the second break is much smaller and closer to shore for those that are just learning. If your intention is to swim in the surf, you’ll need to watch out for surfers, and you might also want to see the beach at low and high tides. At low tides, you can get a good idea of where the rocks are, although there are still some hiding just below the surface. At high tide, you’ll want to remember what you saw at low tide to figure out where you want to go in. In some places, there are strong currents taking you out into the ocean (easy to swim out, quite a bit harder to get back in), and in other places, there are strong cross currents that will take you sideways. It’s a good idea to have goggles to protect eyes, not so much from salty water, but from the sand that get stirred up by the surf breaks. If you’re not a very confident swimmer, I would suggest staying closer to shore. The rocks can be good to see crabs and other small sea creatures. At low tides, there are still some pools in the rocks, and many people like to sit there instead of going out into the surf.

We were in the apartments for a couple weeks when we learned that we had pool privileges at the Banana Beach Bungalows, which is just a bit south of the apartments. While we still spent most of our time at the beach, going to the pool was nice for a change of pace. It was also nice because there isn’t anywhere at the apartment where you can just sit and relax outside.

The apartments are cleaned every day, which is nice because of the dust and sand everywhere. While you have bath towels in the room, you’ll want something for the beach. We managed to buy a couple of cheap camp chairs and beach towels, so we would find a partially shady spot and sit there to watch the waves and read. If you are looking for used books, Zwart Café is the place to go. If you are staying longer than just a few days, you can contact the owner to possibly get a discounted quotation. However, for shorter stays without a discount and where you are not looking to cook some meals, you might consider some of the other places in town.

Great for longer term rental, if that's what you need and want

First off, I stayed here three years in a row, multiple weeks at a time. Why did I stay if it was so bad? Well, I live in NYC where I’m used to bad landlords and exorbitant rents so it felt like home.

WiFi was weak all three years. But the worst was last year when I lost my iPad down a crack in the bed. The management did not respond to numerous messages about it; the caretaker said “it’s lost.”

The owners of this complex also own Banana Beach, Peace Loft and retail complex and other businesses. They have the money to have given some sort of reimbursement or sent a handyman or something for a ridiculous situation that was a complete flaw in their structure. Yes, they aren’t responsible for your belongings but if your electronic equipment falls down a crack in the bed??? Come on. 

But the worst was the owner, Emilia. I did meet her once in town and her lack of friendliness was horrible. I didn’t expect her to connect about the iPad situation but I told her I had stayed at her place three years in a row, equaling thousands of dollars and did not even get a hello.

The woman who cleans is great. The location is good. I did like feeling I was “living” in ST and shoutout to all the businesses who made the trip awesome — Casa Zen and Casa Del Mar for the WiFi, tropico Latino for the pool — but there are places in town with good WiFi, friendly owners, pools, and less expensive than here.

Now I’m back in town and so mad I wasted thousands on an experience that “felt” like home. Vacation should be better than home. Yes, this is safe and convenient but would do research and seek elsewhere if possible. The bad WiFi was really horrible for me as I was supposed to be working remotely and had to move a major deadline — not cool at all. 

And if management is reading this, I still want my iPad back. 

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