Simona Daniele built bridges for Costa Rica's monkeys
Simona Daniele, an Italian hotelier in Costa Rica, co-founded SalveMonos to protect monkeys from electrocution. What began with T-shirt sales to fund wildlife bridges grew into a conservation organization that rescued thousands of animals and pushed for safer electrical infrastructure.
Howler monkeys are reluctant to come down from the trees. In the forests of Costa Rica's Pacific coast, they can spend their lives moving through the canopy without touching the ground. But around Tamarindo, where hotels and houses have replaced much of the forest and roads have widened, getting from one tree to another can be dangerous. To cross the gaps, monkeys sometimes climb onto electrical cables. Many are electrocuted. Those that survive may suffer terrible burns.
In Tamarindo, a coastal town popular with tourists and surfers, the deaths troubled two women who ran local businesses. In 2004, Simona Daniele, an Italian hotelier, and her friend Patricia Sterman decided to do something about them. With their husbands, they each put up $500 to print T-shirts, which they sold to raise money for canopy bridges. Their first efforts paid for 12 crossings.
Daniele had arrived in Costa Rica from Italy in 1995 and settled in Tamarindo, where she owned the Luna Llena Hotel. She had no background in conservation when she and Sterman began their campaign. They called it SalveMonos, a play on the Spanish for both "save monkeys" and "let's save ourselves."
The work was often frustrating. Costa Rica had earned an international reputation for protecting nature, but its electrical infrastructure remained deadly for wildlife. As tourism expanded along the Pacific coast, trees disappeared and power lines multiplied. Daniele spent years pressing electricity companies to make their infrastructure safer. When monkeys were electrocuted, SalveMonos helped arrange rescues and treatment.
When Jane Goodall visited a school in Tamarindo in 2007, Daniele and Sterman went to meet her. They told the celebrated primatologist about the monkeys and their makeshift crossings. Goodall encouraged them to keep going and expand the work.
Over the next two decades, SalveMonos installed more than 300 wildlife bridges and helped rescue over 2,000 animals, many of them electrocuted. In 2024, Costa Rica introduced regulations requiring electricity providers to take measures to protect wildlife. Daniele had spent much of the preceding 20 years arguing for such changes.
Daniele's concerns extended beyond monkeys. She helped establish Halfway Home, which cared for domestic animals, and served as president of CEPIA, an organization supporting disadvantaged children and families in Guanacaste.
She remained dissatisfied with the pace of change. In 2025, she observed that Costa Rica generated clean electricity but continued to distribute it in ways that killed animals.
After her death on October 8th, Sterman recalled an expression her friend often used: "Dejen de preocuparse y ocúpense." Stop worrying and do something about it. There were still monkeys dying on Costa Rica's power lines.
