Veritas Villages

What Veritas Villages is

Veritas Villages is a network of intentional communities in Latin America rather than a single development, and it is designed to keep growing. The villages profiled here are Playa Pacifica on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, which opened first; Coronado on a hillside above the Panamanian Pacific and Chiriquí in the western Panamanian foothills; and Atenas, the largest of them, in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. The developer, Autris, names further communities in Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, and has said it intends to expand into Mexico, Ecuador and Argentina.

Each village is organised around a standard its founder Patrick Hiebert calls F.I.R.S.T.: Freedom, Independence, Resiliency, Self-Sustainability and Transparency. Hiebert and his son Spencer spent years living aboard a boat, generating their own power and fresh water, and the villages carry that experience onto land. Spencer drew the first plans during the pandemic lockdowns, and the intent has not changed since: to depend less on centralised institutions, from governments to utilities to banks.

Where the villages are

Playa Pacifica is a neighbourhood inside the Gran Pacifica beach and golf resort on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, between one and one and a half hours from Managua and its international airport. Coronado stands on a Pacific-facing hillside ten minutes above the town of Coronado, west of Panama City; Chiriquí lies in the foothills of western Panama between La Concepción and Bugaba, half an hour from the Costa Rican border. Atenas occupies a river valley in Costa Rica’s Central Valley, about half an hour from San José’s international airport. Each village has a page of its own with its land, its master plan and what stands on it.

How the villages work

The villages are meant to work off grid from the outset rather than adding solar panels to a conventional subdivision. Power comes from the sun, water from wells and springs on the property, and waste water is treated locally and reused for irrigation. Food production is part of the layout rather than a hobby: every master plan sets aside orchards and community gardens, and most add a greenhouse, a chicken coop or a hydroponic growing area. Each site is chosen partly for whether its soil and rainfall can carry them.

Because the villages share one developer and one standard, they are designed as a network: a household that settles in Panama is meant to have somewhere to stay on the Nicaraguan coast or in the Costa Rican hills. The mix differs by site, but the elements that recur are a community pool, gardens and orchards, a workshop, and a place to eat at the centre of the village.

Veritas Villages do not seek legal autonomy from their host countries. They are private communities under ordinary national law, and the freedom they pursue is practical rather than jurisdictional: self-government inside the community, and enough local production of power, water and food that daily life depends less on outside systems. That places them closer to the intentional-community tradition than to the Charter City or Free Private City models covered elsewhere on this site.

How Veritas Villages came about

Patrick Hiebert had built an off-grid community in Nicaragua, Milagro Verde, in 2009, and the family’s years at sea supplied the rest of the method. Playa Pacifica opened in 2023 as the first village, inside a resort where the amenities already existed; Autris, the developer Hiebert leads, took over the Panamanian village company in October 2023, launched Coronado in July 2024 with most of its homesites reserved on the first day, and bought the Atenas land in September 2025, the largest purchase in the network so far.