The First Time We Saw the Land
I remember the truck struggling on the last stretch of dirt road. We had been driving for what felt like hours past small towns and mango groves, following a route that fewer and fewer people seemed to know. When we finally stopped and stepped out, the noise fell away. There were birds. Wind through the trees. And beyond the brush, the faintest shimmer of the Chacahua lagoon catching the late-afternoon light.
My wife looked at me. Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to. The land was dense with tropical trees, uneven in places, sloping gently in others. It wasn’t manicured. It wasn’t easy. But it was alive in a way that made us both pause and listen. That was the moment Montserrat Reserve stopped being an idea and became something real.
We had been looking at properties for the better part of a year. Some were closer to the highway. Some had better roads. A few were cheaper. But none of them felt like this. None of them made us want to sit down in the dirt and just stay.
Why Chacahua — and Nowhere Else
People always ask us why we chose Chacahua. Honestly, Chacahua chose us.
The Lagunas de Chacahua National Park is one of those rare places on the Oaxacan coast that has been left mostly untouched — not because nobody knows about it, but because the people who live there have protected it. The lagoon system is a network of mangroves, estuaries, and coastal wetlands that supports an incredible range of bird species, marine life, and native vegetation. It’s a place where crocodiles still sun themselves on the banks in the morning and bioluminescence lights up the water on certain nights.
The remoteness was part of the appeal. We didn’t want to build something next to a highway or a resort strip. We wanted a place where guests would need to slow down to arrive — where the journey itself began to change your rhythm before you even set foot on the property. Chacahua demands that. There is no fast way to get here, and that is exactly the point.
But it was also the community that convinced us. The people of Chacahua and the surrounding villages have a relationship with the land that we wanted to learn from, not compete with. Fishermen who know the lagoon by instinct. Families who grow what they eat. A pace of life that doesn’t revolve around a screen. We wanted Montserrat Reserve to exist within that context, not in spite of it.
A Name That Carries Everything
We named the reserve after our daughter, Montserrat. It was never a business decision. It was a promise.
The name Montserrat comes from the Latin mons serratus — serrated mountain. It’s the name of a striking mountain range in Catalonia, Spain, where the jagged peaks rise from the earth like ancient teeth. The Benedictine monastery perched among those rocks has been a site of pilgrimage for over a thousand years. The name carries weight: resilience, devotion, something built to endure.
When our daughter was born, we gave her a name that meant all of those things. And when we stood on that land for the first time, looking at the uneven terrain and the wild canopy and the lagoon beyond, the name came back to us. This place was its own kind of serrated mountain — not smooth, not easy, but deeply beautiful because of its rough edges.
Naming the reserve after her was our way of saying: this is for the future. This is something we are building not just for ourselves, but for the people who come after us. Every tree we keep standing, every decision we make to build with the land instead of against it — that’s her inheritance. That’s what Montserrat Reserve means to us.
The Early Decisions That Defined Everything
The first thing most developers do when they acquire raw land is clear it. Bring in heavy equipment, flatten everything, and start from a blank slate. We watched other projects along the coast do exactly that. It’s faster. It’s cheaper in the short term. And it destroys everything that made the land worth buying in the first place.
We decided early on that we would not clear-cut a single tree. Not one. If a tree was standing where we wanted to put a wall, we moved the wall. If roots ran through a path we had planned, we rerouted the path. This meant that our architectural plans changed constantly in those first months. It also meant that when we were done, the property would still feel like what it was — a living piece of the Oaxacan coast, not a construction site with some landscaping bolted on afterward.
We walked the land dozens of times before we drew a single line on paper. We mapped the mature trees, the natural drainage patterns, the spots where the breeze came through strongest, the areas that flooded in the rainy season and those that stayed dry. That mapping became the blueprint. The land told us where to build. We just had to listen.
This philosophy is central to everything we do at Montserrat Reserve. We are not imposing a vision onto a landscape. We are finding the vision that already exists within it.
Five Casas, One Vision
From the beginning, we knew we didn’t want a hotel. Hotels are about volume. They are about occupancy rates and turnover and maximizing revenue per square meter. That is a perfectly valid business model, but it’s not what this land asked for.
We planned five casas — five independent villas, each designed to feel like its own private retreat within the larger reserve. The idea was that a guest staying in one casa might never see a guest staying in another. Each villa would have its own relationship with the landscape: one might look out onto the garden, another toward the lagoon, a third tucked into a grove of trees with nothing but canopy overhead.
Five casas also meant we could keep the footprint small. We didn’t need a massive reception building or a parking lot for fifty cars. The infrastructure could stay proportional to the land, not the other way around.
Each villa is being designed with natural ventilation in mind — cross breezes instead of air conditioning wherever possible, covered outdoor living spaces that extend the usable area without adding to the built footprint, and private outdoor showers that make the boundary between inside and outside feel almost irrelevant.
The Garden and the Natural Pool
Two features have been part of the plan since the very first conversation my wife and I had about this project: an organic garden and a natural swimming pool.
The garden isn’t an afterthought or a decorative feature. It’s functional. We want to grow a significant portion of the food that our guests eat — herbs, vegetables, tropical fruits. The Oaxacan coast is extraordinarily generous when it comes to growing conditions. With proper soil management and composting, we can produce year-round without chemicals. The garden also becomes an experience in itself. Guests can walk through it, pick herbs for their meals, understand where their food comes from.
The natural pool was a commitment to our broader sustainability philosophy. Conventional pools require chlorine, constant filtration, and enormous amounts of energy to maintain. A natural pool uses plants and biofilters to keep the water clean — a regenerative system that actually improves the surrounding ecosystem rather than straining it. It’s more complex to build. It requires more research and more careful engineering. But once it’s running, it’s a living system, not a chemical one. That distinction matters to us.
The Challenges Nobody Warns You About
I would be lying if I said this has been easy. Building anything in a remote location comes with a set of challenges that no amount of planning fully prepares you for.
Permits were the first hurdle. Mexico’s permitting process for construction in ecologically sensitive areas is layered and slow — and it should be. These regulations exist to protect places like Chacahua from careless development. But navigating the system requires patience, local knowledge, and a willingness to adapt your timeline. We learned quickly that our schedule belonged to the process, not to us.
Logistics were the next lesson. Materials that would take a day to deliver in a city can take a week to reach our site. Some things can’t come by truck at all and need to be brought in by boat. Every delivery requires coordination with tides, weather, and road conditions that change with the season. You learn to plan further ahead than you ever thought necessary, and you learn to accept that some things will simply take longer.
Then there was the learning curve of sustainable building itself. We came into this with strong convictions but limited technical experience. How do you source local materials without depleting them? How do you design a septic system that doesn’t contaminate the water table? How do you build a structure that can withstand both the intense coastal sun and the heavy rains of hurricane season without relying on industrial materials? Each of these questions led us to local builders, to research, to conversations with people who have been building on this coast for generations. We learned more from a seventy-year-old carpenter in a nearby village than from any architecture textbook.
The remoteness that we fell in love with is the same remoteness that makes every logistical step harder. We accepted that trade-off a long time ago, and we would make the same choice again.
What the Future Holds
As I write this, Montserrat Reserve is still being built. The land has been cleared — selectively, carefully. The first foundations are in. The garden beds are being prepared. The natural pool design is being finalized. Every week, the vision becomes a little more visible in the physical world.
But the truth is, a project like this is never really finished. Even after the five casas are complete and the first guests arrive, the reserve will keep evolving. Trees will grow. The garden will expand. We will learn things from our guests, from the land, from the seasons that we can’t predict right now.
We want Montserrat Reserve to become a place that people return to — not because of luxury amenities or Instagram-worthy design, but because of how it makes them feel. Quieter. More present. More connected to a landscape that has been here for thousands of years and, if we do our job well, will be here for thousands more.
We also want to deepen our relationship with the Chacahua community. As the reserve grows, we want to create opportunities for local employment, support local producers, and contribute to conservation efforts in the lagoon system. This isn’t charity — it’s the only way a project like this makes sense. An eco retreat that doesn’t serve its surrounding community isn’t an eco retreat. It’s just a building in the woods.
Our daughter is still young. She doesn’t fully understand yet what we are building or why it carries her name. But one day she will walk through these trees, swim in the natural pool, eat fruit from the garden, and know that her parents built something that tried to leave the world a little better than they found it.
That’s the story of Montserrat Reserve. Not a business plan. Not a brand exercise. A family deciding to take a wild, beautiful piece of land and turn it into a sanctuary — for ourselves, for our guests, and for the land itself.
If you want to learn more about what we are building, visit our about page to understand our philosophy, explore the villas we are designing, or read about why Chacahua is one of the most extraordinary places on the Oaxacan coast.