Veritas Villages

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.

The villages are meant to work off grid from the outset rather than adding solar panels to a conventional subdivision. Power comes from sun and wind, water from wells and capture on the property, and waste is treated locally. 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, membership is designed to travel. Residents of one village can use the amenities of the others, which is the practical meaning of calling this a network: a household can settle in Panama and still 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.