Chris Newberry
Founder, Tai Nuare
Twenty-two years ago, Chris Newberry arrived on a remote peninsula in Bocas del Toro, Panama, and purchased twenty eight acres at its farthest point. What began as a personal retreat became a lifelong relationship: a close friendship with the island's shaman and elders, and an introduction to the Ngäbe Buglé elders and community who call this coastline home.
That relationship shaped everything that followed. Chris recognized that the tribe's traditional way of life, built for generations on abundant land and resources, was under real pressure from population growth and shrinking territory. He set out to build something that could create lasting opportunity for the community around him: employment, food production, cultural exchange, and a model of development that strengthens rather than displaces.
From Vision to Twenty Properties
In the years that followed, that original vision expanded from a single boutique resort concept into a four hundred and five acre sanctuary. The surrounding properties came available to Chris one after another, over roughly fourteen months, a rate of acquisition that Chris describes as one of the clearest signs he has received that this project was meant to exist.
Why I’m Offering Tai Nuare
Twenty-two years ago, I stood at the edge of this peninsula for the first time and understood, in a way I still can’t fully explain, that my life had changed direction. I bought that first parcel. Over the next two decades I gathered nineteen more, piece by patient piece, until the peninsula was whole.
I built my home over the water here — beside the reef, never upon it — and declared the waters around it a sanctuary. The reef answered with abundance. The Ngäbe-Buglé, our neighbors, became partners and friends. And with architects and dreamers I drew the full vision of what this land could hold: the commons, the sanctuaries, a way of living with a place rather than on it.
So why offer it now? Because the land is ready for more than I alone can give it. The assembly is done, the title is done, the designs are done — what remains is the chapter that needs new energy and deeper resources, and I would rather hand the peninsula whole to the right steward than watch the vision shrink to fit my own horizon.
I’m not looking for a transaction. I’m looking for the person who feels what I felt on that first morning. If that might be you, come stand at the edge of it yourself.
— Chris Newberry