Driving through the countryside of Costa Rica, up the sides of mountains or volcanos particularly lends itself to purchasing one of Costa Rica’s most popular products: 
cheese!
Many small farms along the highway set up small roadside stands where they sell their homemade cheeses, produced just off the highway at their farm. Fresh cheese, Costa Rican style. (The white bags in the image on the right are cheese for sale!)
The Monteverde region is the most popular for the production of such dairy items largely because of the people who settled here in 1951, a group of Quaker families from Alabama who were looking for a place to live where they could hold to their pacifist religious beliefs. Costa Rica had recently abolished its army, and the lush cloud forest region that they named Green Mountain (Monteverde) seemed like the perfect place to settle.
Farming dairy cattle was the means by which the Quakers earned their keep and in 1953 they started “mass production” by opening the Monteverde Cheese Factory. At the time there were only 2 employees producing about 10 kg of cheese a day! Today the factory, Productores de Monteverde SA, now boasts about 160 local employees and produces around 1550 kg of cheese on a daily basis. The economy in the region depends greatly on the production of cheese: since 1955 multiple farms have been providing milk to the factory; that number has now grown to over 250 local farms.
The first pasteurised cheese in Costa Rica, as well as the first cheese produced in Monteverde is 
Gouda. Now the Productores de Monteverde SA. produces 17 different varieties of cheese including Emmental, Swiss, a Parmesan, smoked provolone, smoked with local coffee wood and Monte Rico, a lower fat cheese. In addition to a variety of cheeses, Productores de Monteverde SA. has expanded to include production of delicious ice creams flavored with other home-grown produce: coffee, coconut, mango, pineapple, and orange.
Cheese lovers from all over will enjoy a tour of the Productores de Monteverde Factory known locally as La Lechería or La Fábrica to see the process of the production of Costa Rican cheese.
Bilingual tours are available twice daily, at 9 am and again at 2 pm. The tour costs $10 for adults and $8 for students and lasts about 1.5 hours.
The Productores de Monteverde SA Factory is open Tuesday-Sunday from 7:30 am – 4 pm and closed on all major National holidays. (See list here)
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