History of Mirador de Quetzales
This story beguins in 1948, when Eddy Serrano married Leonor Obando in Cartago, where they lived together for a few years. By 1950, tired of being a field worker, Don Eddy decided to venture up into the highlands of Cerro de la Muerte, aiming to get a piece of land and working by and for himself. He instantly got hooked by the beauty of this place and decided to go for it!
3 years later, the couple moved definetely to the farm in the mountain; however, Don Eddy struggled and had to keep working for other farmers to subsist with his wife and 3 children, as he had no money to clear the land and to produce his own income for a while. In fact, he was bareley producing enough to feed the family, to the point of -several times, several days- not even having enough to buy food!
These days he couldn´t find a job, he started to work hard in his own land, planting grass -for future-hopped cows- and blackberries with the firm ideal of being his own boss sometime soon.
While clearing the land for planting, Don Eddy was selling wood, charcoal and fence posts in order of being able to buy food for the family and investing a bit in his property.
Within 22 years together, the couple had 15 kids, the last one being born in 1970. By 1990, 7 of their children had died due to deseases that nowadays are easy to threat and several others had married and left with their families. However, those staying in the highlands with their parents and their own families, started to bring numbers back up and money wasn’t enough… again.
Because of all of this and even when he had cleared some trees in the past, Don Eddy kept his ecological vision, as one day he said: “we have too mucho green gold in here” (refering to the magestic forest you can now enjoy within our preserve). Then he said: “We are going to work in tourism”… “we’ll ask the neighbour to write a sign in english for our farm”. He visited the foreigner with one of his sons and this one wrote in a piece of paper: “WELCOME TO THE QUETZAL FARM”… That very same day, the son whom accompanied him, started to create the sign, which the following day was placed at the entrance of the farm, by the main road.
What they could never had imagined, was the inmediate impact that sign actually had and just 2 hours after placing it out there, the very first 2 people came in, requesting the quetzal’s tour!
Of course there was nothing prepared for such a tour… no binoculars, no scope or much less a bird guide book, but little by little, more and more people started lo learn and more and more visitors started to join the magic of what today is Mirador de Quetzales.
