by Rex Schmetterling

It’s no secret that real estate investment is a hot ticket in Nicaragua. Land prices are a bargain compared to the global market and investors are buying up large tracts of it, building houses, roads and factories.  Development is economic progress, but it can come at the expense of habitat loss and degradation of the environment. But there are people doing something besides buying land to bulldoze flat and put a building on. Some investors are buying land to preserve or even enhance the natural world, to create sustainable, evolving land uses.

Vince Ventre is perhaps the last guy you’d think would start a nature center. A commercial roofer (local 30) from Philadelphia, he would seem to be the guy passionately discussing Harley Davidson motorcycles and football scores. Instead, its wild flowers, birds, and as his many tattoos would suggest, butterflies. While traveling the world adding to his butterfly collection, including seven weeks in the jungles of New Guinea, he came to Nicaragua and decided to stay.  He bought 16.5 acres north of San Juan del Sur one kilometer from the ocean, “because of potential for growth and less expensive land,” Vince said.