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travel: Central America 2024

Travel: Panama & Costa Rica Day 11: Selvatura Sloths!

Wendy Dembowski

• 3 min read
Travel: Panama & Costa Rica Day 11: Selvatura Sloths!

The first part of our tour at Selvatura took us on the hanging bridges (covered here). Part two took us to the Selvatura Sloth Sanctuary. When planning the trip, the sloth sanctuary was insurance against my fear that we wouldn't see sloths in the wild. While we did see a sloth in the wild in Panama City and at many more at La Perica Sloth Garden I'm still very happy that we visited the Selvatura Sanctuary.

The sloths at Selvatura are kept in a huge indoor habitat. These were sloths that were orphaned as babies or injured preventing them from being released back into the wild. All of the Selvatura sloths are female two-toed sloths.

Mostly they did the sloth thing of hanging around and hiding their faces. I mean, who doesn't love a ball of fur?

Sloth hiding her face behind her collection of limbs and claws

They have very cute faces, so I was incredibly happy to see this girl nomming on her lunch and then moving about the habitat.

She's holding her food near her face before sending it down the hatch
Look at that lil sloth tongue as she prepares to eat the food in her hand.
Nom! Also, notice she's using both of her hands to eat, so she's hanging backwards only from her hind legs. She was pulling food from the bowl below her head.
After she finished eating, the right sloth in the photo above was on the move. Her friend on the left briefly showed her face to see what was going on.
With all that post lunch energy she continued her climb
A different sloth looks on from higher up in the habitat

Overall I was quite happy with our choice to visit the Selvatura Sloth Sanctuary. The first three-toed sloth I saw in Panama City was moving around quite a bit, but it was also quite far from me. The sanctuary gave us an opportunity to see the two-toed sloth fairly close up. Two-toed sloths are also generally nocturnal so in the artificial environment we also got to see them a bit more active than we would have had we opted only to see them in the wild.