In one corner of the terrace, sipping a coffee, sits a Honduran architect who hopes to build a city on the moon. In another, a Uruguayan entrepreneur looking to develop a private island. Overseeing events is a German venture capitalist whose company seeks to hack human biology and extend life.
It is just another brunchtime in Próspera, an unusual quasi-independent territory, owned by a group of international financiers, on the northern coast of the Honduran island of Roatán.
“You get all kinds of wild stuff here”, said Jason Hart, 46, an investor from Denver, Colorado, who became a full-time resident of the libertarian community in 2023. He said when he first visited, he met “one guy building a jet pack and another doing ‘the Lord’s work’ with Bitcoin” and immediately concluded that “this is my people”.
For enthusiasts like Hart, Próspera, perched on 1,000 acres of mostly undeveloped land overlooking the turquoise Caribbean, is almost paradise, or as some of its residents put it: “Libertopia”. Personal income tax is 5 percent, corporation tax is 1 percent, and a new business can be set up via mobile phone in a matter of hours. All while sitting poolside.
One deciding attraction for him and others is that regulation is not imposed from above. Companies enrolled in the special economic zone can pick and choose from the laws of any country in the world, or propose bespoke regulation of their own.
That laissez-faire approach has proved especially appealing to start-ups offering longevity gene therapy—a process that involves targeting the genetic mechanisms of aging—to set up in Próspera. The technology has not been approved in the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other authorities.
Bryan Johnson, aka “the man who wants to live for ever”, a 47-year-old American who is spending a substantial proportion of his fortune attempting to reverse his own aging process, traveled twice last year to Roatán for gene therapy administered by a Próspera-registered company, Minicircle.
He appears to believe that it is working, announcing in January that he was growing old so slowly he only needed to celebrate his birthday every 21 months.
That a tropical hideaway could make taxes and death a little less inevitable might seem too good to be true, even for the most fanatical promoters of Próspera. But many of its investors insist that what they are doing is serious, and that their experiment is important.
“The smaller a political state, the more functional it often is,” said one American resident. “When you get a million people in one organization, it’s very hard to form a coherent vision.”
The theory that self-governing city states could become catalysts for growth in the developing world came to renewed international attention after a 2009 TED talk by Paul Romer, a former chief economist of the World Bank.
Take a piece of uninhabited land, Romer argued, govern it well, and let the free market do the rest. As it grows people will move there. Migrants would have less reason to emigrate. Creaking traditional governments would have to compete with an agile neighbor. A mini–Hong Kong, without the colonial baggage, was the idea.
Detractors argue that selling parcels of land in impoverished countries to foreigners who then establish their own laws is anything but a modern proposition. For them, the entire project has the air of a banana republic: a term that the author O Henry coined after observing plutocratic American fruit companies operate in 19th-century Honduras.
One longtime critic of Honduras’s economic development zones is the left-wing president, Xiomara Castro. An opponent of neo-liberalism in all its forms, she has vowed to end the policy on the basis that it is an affront to her nation’s sovereignty.
“Who are the real beneficiaries? The great millionaires and billionaires who can go to live in a paradisiacal zone of our national territory, and who can then absorb ever more land,” Fernando Garcia, the presidential commissioner against special economic zones, told The Times of London.
Próspera, whose CEO is the Venezuelan-born wealth fund manager Erick Brimen, did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article, but on its website states that “Próspera has created over 3,400 local Honduran jobs. We offer salaries at least 25 percent above the national minimum wage”. It added: “Our goal is to stimulate socio-economic development and create opportunities in Honduras.”
In 2023, Castro signed legislation to repeal the law that established Próspera and the other two special economic zones in the country. Próspera’s wealthy backers—the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, was one of the project’s initial investors—have since fought back with a claim in damages for up to $10.7 billion, equivalent to a third of Honduras’s entire GDP. They argue Honduras is violating a 50-year legal stability guarantee that it gave its original investors. A ruling from the international arbitration tribunal of the World Bank is still awaited.
A further possible setback to the project came last year, when Castro’s predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernández, the president from 2014 to 2022 and one of the most active promoters of the free zone legislation, was convicted by a U.S. court of trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine and sentenced to 45 years in jail.
All this legal anguish may help explain why Próspera, touted in its early days as the next Dubai, is as yet nothing of the sort. Its main construction is a luxury 14-storey apartment block, the tallest building in Roatán, where building heights are normally strictly limited. “It was built without the use of a crane, labor is so cheap here,” mentioned one foreign resident.
Further planned towers are yet to materialize. Much of the current property portfolio of Próspera comes from its purchase of a nearby hotel and golf resort.
There is no formal frontier to pass between the rest of Roatán and the city, but visitors need to register in advance and are asked to show a QR code by security guards. Once registered, you receive an email confirming not only that you can enter the area, but also that you have the right to create a business and purchase property.
A few hundred meters from the main entrance is the small fishing village of Crawfish Rock. Most of the residents in the settlement of wooden houses, shaded by mango trees, speak English. They are the descendants of slaves brought to Roatán and the other Bay Islands during its intermittent occupation by the British from the 16th to the 19th centuries.
What do they make of their libertarian neighbors who planned to construct a Caribbean Dubai next door?
“I’m OK with it. Maybe one day I could walk inside and I could get a job,” said Sara Stewart, a housewife. Overhearing her, one of her neighbors, who declined to give her name, angrily disagreed. “A president cannot sign away pieces of our country!” she shouted. “And now they are suing for $11 billion. Who is going to end up paying for that? Us!”
The whole idea of charter cities was that they would be separated and protected from the political problems and complexities of the nations in which they were based.
Próspera is finding out that that is much easier in theory than in practice.
Stephen Gibbs is a Venezuela-based writer who covers Latin America and the Caribbean for The Times and The Sunday Times of London
