I'm not a Costa Rica expert, but when I drove to the hotel the area itself and surroundings were really brown and dead. It poured one day and one of the restaurant server said something about how happy they were because it hadn't rained in forever. I'm just guessing here but seems plausible that if you build a hotel in the middle of a draught that it's not to be very green, but maybe at the end of the year after the rainy reason I would have to believe it would look different. I remember visiting southern California during a draught and seeing a similar thing.