We are Dom and Adrian, from Switzerland and Spain respectively and met here in Colombia with the same idea of escaping the big-city life and get out of our comfort zone to create something lasting and in harmony with nature. We thought we could use our expertise (from having both travelled extensively) to build our own little paradise.
It was far from an easy endeavour, although in theory investing and buying land in Colombia is relatively straight-forward, there are lots of pitfalls and we had to learn to exercise patience more than once. After all the initial paperwork, such as bringing and declaring money into Colombia, founding a company, buying land, getting it background-checked with lawyers, finding people and companies to help us build, we eventually opened in March 2020. Unfortunately for us, that was right when the Covid-pandemic started hitting South America with all its implications.
Fast forward to almost a year later, Adrian decided to stay there to run and manage the hostel and restaurant. Dom decided to return to Europe but is still involved with supporting with administrative and technical things when needed.
We are proud to say we somehow managed to weather the Covid-storm and now have an amazing team of employees, like Ivan our Chef from Bogota who brought it a lot of positive energy and is just as keen as us to keep improving, plant more trees, create more delicious plant-based food and grow in a sustainable way.
Trying to make a positive impact
Whilst running a hostel in itself is always having an impact on our planet through the use of resources like concrete, wood, steel etc, we tried to keep this to a minimum.
- We used a lot of Bamboo in our construction, although not native to Colombia, grows very quickly and, once cut, will re-grow almost indefinitely. We sourced it locally and made sure it wasn’t coming from monocultures. The rest of our timber is from managed forests, we made sure not to get anything illegally harvested native forests.
- Food: If you ever calculated your footprint, you will have noticed that, aside from heating our homes and how we travel, our eating-habits have the biggest impact. By eating less dairy and meat (especially red meat) you can significantly reduce your footprint, that’s why almost everything we offer is vegetarian or vegan.
- Waste: Unfortunately Colombia, like many developing nations, doesn’t have a lot of modern waste treatment, most if not all waste will end up on landfills. The same goes for waste-water, especially in the countryside (big cities like Bogota are notable exceptions). That’s why we invested in a natural waste-water garden, where natural human waste will be used as fertilizers for certain plants that filter out the harmful stuff so that eventually it can be re-released into the ground-water.
- Planting trees: Since obtaining our nearly 3 hectares of land, we planted well over 100 trees, most of them are native-trees, others are fruit trees like avocado, mango or citrus that we use to cook without having to order from mono-cultures that needs to get transported. We also get all of herbs from our own garden where we don’t use any chemicals or fertilisers.