When people ask me what an intentional community in Oaxaca actually is, I usually pause before answering. Not because the question is difficult, but because the honest answer takes longer than people expect. The phrase has been borrowed by enough different projects — communal housing experiments, wellness retreats, co-living startups — that it has lost some of its precision. And precision matters, especially here, where what we are building has real consequences for the land and for the people who already live near it.
So let me try to be specific.
What “intentional” actually means
The word points to something simple: the community exists because people chose it, not because proximity or circumstance created it. A neighborhood is not intentional in this sense. A village is not intentional. What makes a community intentional is that a group of people decided, explicitly, to share something more than just geography — shared values, a shared relationship to the land, some form of collective decision-making.
At Rancho de las Estrellas, we have tried to write those values down rather than leave them as vague aspirations. The land ethic is concrete: seventy percent of the property stays open. No structures, no clearing, no development pressure on the forest edge or the conservation buffer toward the mangrove system. That is not a guideline. It is a commitment built into how the land is held and governed.
The governance model is collective in a meaningful sense. Large decisions — what gets built, how common spaces are used, how we engage with the neighboring community of Zapotalito — are made together, not by a developer or a management company. That process is slower than top-down decision-making. It is also more likely to produce something that people actually stand behind.
Organizations like ic.org and GEN — the Global Ecovillage Network — have documented hundreds of intentional communities across the world, and one of the consistent findings is that the communities which last are the ones that invest in their governance processes early, before there is conflict to resolve. We have taken that seriously.
What we are not
It helps to name what we are not, because the confusions are real and they affect who comes here.
We are not a resort. A resort is designed so that guests pass through and leave, with no obligation to the place or to each other. Some of what happens at Rancho de las Estrellas looks, from the outside, like a resort — there is a retreat center, YogaMala, there are people visiting for a week at a time. But the difference is that the people building here are building homes, not amenities. Residents stay. The relationships between people accumulate over years. That is a different kind of place.
We are not a gated compound. I grew up on the Oaxacan coast, in this region, and I know what it looks like when an outside project walls itself off from the community that was already here. The fishing village of Zapotalito sits at the edge of our land, and our relationship with that community is outward-facing — collaborative where possible, honest about our presence, never pretending we arrived into an empty place. The Zapotecos who live and work along this coast have a claim on this territory that is older and deeper than any land title.
We are not a cult or a rigid ideological project. There is no single doctrine here, no required lifestyle, no belief system you need to hold in order to belong. People come from different countries, different backgrounds, different ideas about how to live well. What we share is a commitment to the land and to each other — not a prescribed way of thinking about the world.
Why Oaxaca, and why this coast specifically
I was born on the Oaxacan Pacific coast. My family is from this region, and I have spent my life watching the ways outside money and outside ideas interact with places like this — sometimes generatively, often not.
The cultural richness of this part of Oaxaca is not decorative. The Zapotec communities along the coast carry forms of knowledge — ecological, social, ceremonial — that are not available in any archive. The national park that protects the Lagunas de Chacahua lagoon system was established because people recognized that the mangroves and wetlands and dark skies here have value that cannot be captured by extractive development. That protection is one of the reasons we could build something here that has a chance of remaining what it intends to be.
The village of Zapotalito is not a backdrop for our project. It is a community with its own life, its own economy, its own relationship to this landscape. One of the things that drew me to what Paul was thinking about when we began planning Rancho de las Estrellas was that he understood this — that arriving here with an outside project meant accepting an obligation to the place, not just a right to develop it.
How it works in practice
Community life here is not choreographed. There are shared meals when people want them — sometimes spontaneous, sometimes planned around a harvest or a celebration. There are common spaces: gathering areas, the food forest that Boaz Agmon has been developing, the paths through the open land. There is a nature school, Nandia, that emerged from the belief that children who grow up understanding the ecology of a place will relate to it differently than children who don’t.
But there is also the freedom to close your door. People who build homes here are not signing up for forced togetherness. The community is present when you want it and not when you don’t. The balance between shared life and private life is one that each household works out for itself, within the broader agreements we have made collectively.
Decisions that affect everyone — infrastructure, new construction, how we handle the relationship with Zapotalito — are made in conversation, with everyone who has a stake in the outcome. That is sometimes inefficient. It is also, I believe, the only way to build something that doesn’t eventually collapse under the weight of unspoken disagreements.
The longer project
What we are trying to do here is not new. Intentional communities have existed in many forms across many cultures and centuries. What changes is the context — the particular ecology, the particular human community, the particular pressures of this historical moment. The Pacific coast of Oaxaca in the 2020s is not the same as any other place or time, and the project we are building is trying to be specific to here, not to apply a template from somewhere else.
I think about the children who will grow up at the Rancho — some already here, others not yet born — and what it will mean for them to have been raised in a place that took its relationship to the land seriously. That is the thing I care most about. Not the design of the buildings or the programming of the retreat center, but the kind of people that a place like this helps form.
If you are curious about what living here actually looks like — the land, the lots, the commitments you would be making — our vision page is the right place to start. If you are ready to think concretely about what it means to build here, the make-it-yours page lays that out honestly.
We are not trying to convince anyone. We are trying to be clear about what this is, so that the people who come are the people who actually belong here.