Twenty years of land. One idea. One hillside.

The founders settle on the peninsula and establish what becomes its largest land surveying and titling company, acting for around 1,500 clients.

This matters more than it sounds. In the Dominican Republic, the difference between a clean, deslindado title and a disputed one is the difference between a development and a lawsuit. Ten years were spent learning that distinction on other people's land before any of it was bought.

Parcel by parcel, option by option, one of the largest privately held land positions on the peninsula is put together. No marketing, no investors, no website — and, at that point, no plan for what to build on it.

The founders open five eco-boutique hotels with local partners and build their first two small condominium buildings. They prove that low-density, design-led hospitality works commercially in Samaná — the ground the Nomad City idea would later stand on.

Marek Zmysłowski — co-founder of Jumia Travel, HotelOnline and SunRoof, previously at Rocket Internet, RTB House and OLX — begins working on the peninsula's two great unbuilt sites: El Valle and Monte Rojo. He had spent a career building things that did not exist yet. What he needed was land, and the founders had spent fifteen years assembling it.

Monte Rojo — the red mountain — becomes Nomad City.

The first substantive request he sends, three days after the company email address exists, is not for a rendering or a brand. It is for an example of a Dominican land title. The paperwork came before the picture.

Berlin practice Jasper Architects begins work on the El Valle and Monte Rojo developments, and an investment agreement with the practice follows later that year. The concept is no longer a conversation; it is on paper.

An eight-day programme brings the first prospective investors to the peninsula to walk the land themselves. The pattern holds for the next four years: people are asked to stand on the hillside before they are asked for anything else.

Investment agreements are executed through the final days of December. The company enters 2023 funded, with a masterplan in progress and land under contract.

Marek consolidates the land bank, the titling business and the hospitality projects into a single holding company built to develop, not just to own. Investors and advisors join. A Polish joint-stock company, Samana Nomad City S.A., is incorporated in November as the vehicle for a public share issue.

Parts of the land had long been occupied by farming families. Dominican law is clear and firmly on the side of the registered owner, and the fast route was available. Samana Group did not take it.

“The occupants are mainly poor farmers searching for land to grow food and survive. We have agreed with each family to move them to a new house built by Samana Group on a piece of land donated to them by Samana Group.”Marek Zmysłowski · Investor Letter, H1 2024

Every family was rehoused, on land given to them, in houses the company built. It took longer and cost more than an eviction order would have. It is also the reason Nomad City is built alongside the communities around it rather than against them — and the practice has been carried forward onto every parcel acquired since.

Land for the first stages of Nomad City is acquired outright, with the position for the entire project secured behind it — enough ground for all seven planned stages, held before a single house was sold.

The first notarised transactions for the Nomad City land are executed and delivered by Dominican counsel. The ground the town would stand on is now held on clean, registered title.

An internationally recognised practice is appointed to masterplan the community, and an experienced Dominican legal counsel — previously in-house at Philip Morris Caribbean and at Grupo Puntacana — joins to run the legal side.

Permitting for Nomad City Stage 1 is completed, and a tender opens for contractors — weighted towards firms that have already built on the Samaná Peninsula.

Work begins on Nomad City I. The first technical roads are cut into the masterplan, ground clearing starts for the car park, the condominium and the first six villas, and power, cameras and perimeter fencing come to site. The chief architect calls it one of the best days the company has had.

With construction underway, the concept's authors are named: Pit Marenco and Traktor Arquitectura, the practice behind the Nomad City design language.

On a mountain, the basics are not footings — they are access. The first phase of the approach road is completed: staking, excavation, ground compaction and sub-base. Geotechnical investigation finishes alongside it, giving the engineers exactly what they need to design foundations and drainage for the slope.

Constructora Lugo sets up its tool park, machinery and mobile offices on site. Recruitment opens for experienced construction crews from Poland to work alongside the Dominican teams.

Offering documents are filed with Poland's financial supervision authority and a regulated equity issue goes to market. Series B shares are allotted to the new shareholders in August and entered in the shareholders' register kept by Trigon Dom Maklerski before the year is out.

The road network cut across the entire Nomad City masterplan is captured in 3D scans — a permanent, measurable record of what is actually on the ground. Excavation begins for the condominium foundations and geotechnical testing extends across the remaining plots.

A configurable, repeatable house type launches — designed to be built the same way a hundred times rather than bespoke once. Marek's framing to investors at the time: "Our Flat House is our Ford Model T. To paraphrase the famous quote: you can get it in any variation you want, as long as it's in the configurator."

Groundwork begins for the condominium and the first three Flat Houses, with twenty more behind them. Thirty platforms are excavated into the hillside. Footings are laid out, rebar is tied and the first columns go up.

A geotechnical engineer is put in front of a camera to talk about what the hillside is actually made of — clay depth, rock formations, slope stability, and what it takes to build on it so the houses are still there in a hundred years. Most developers show the view. This series showed the soil.

Foundations go in across the first plots and the walls follow. By the autumn report, 13,000 m³ of soil have been moved off site and 650 m³ of rock brought in; excavated rock is reused on site as fill rather than hauled away. A general contractor is under contract and an on-site concrete batching plant is planned.

The Nomad City showroom opens — the interiors, materials and finishes of the villas built at full scale, so that buyers can stand in the rooms rather than read about them. Coralina stone quarried on the peninsula, local hardwood, poured concrete floors, linen, rattan: a material palette drawn from the island rather than imported onto it.

On 23 August, around 100 RE/MAX agents are hosted on site, touring the showroom and walking the foundations of the first Flat House villas. It is the first time the project is shown to a room of people with no stake in liking it.

A "no objection" is issued for the first three Flat Houses in September, and the Ayuntamiento de Samaná issues its construction permit on 7 November. On site, walls rise on three houses while foundations are dug for six more, electrical and water installations go in, and the engineered retaining walls that hold the eastern plots are built.

In the same period the company reaches its first month of operating profitability.

Buyers can specify their own house online — layout, finishes, packages — and receive a personalised offer automatically. It is the mechanism that makes a repeatable house type feel like a bespoke one, and it turns configuration into something a buyer does themselves rather than something they negotiate.

Foundation slabs are poured for the first Flat Houses, with concrete tested on site and specimens collected for strength testing. Fourteen people on the pour.

Nine of the Phase 1 houses are under construction, six of them started in a single month. Half of Stage 1 is sold.

Each plot gets its own geotechnical study before anything is poured on it. A rig is walked onto the platform, boreholes are drilled, samples are taken and the foundation is designed for that specific ground rather than for an average of the hillside. At Monte Rojo the clay depth varies between one and ten metres across a few hundred metres, which is exactly why this is done plot by plot.

Slab and structural pours continue across the site, with the concrete pump working plot to plot along the ridge.

Nomad City Phase 1 is fully sold. Rather than open Phase 2 immediately, sales are paused until Phase 1 is delivered. Selling faster than you build is how developments get into trouble here; the decision was to stop and build.

Flat Houses rising on foundations built to last — and a site visit that month from investors and future residents, walking the plots they had bought.

The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources issues the environmental permit for the project on 22 July 2025 — the approval that allows the works on the hillside to proceed, and the one that takes the longest to earn on a site this sensitive. It follows the environmental studies filed for Nomad City and renews annually.

The following day the irrevocable Dominican trust Fideicomiso Samaná Land Bank is registered — a regulated vehicle that holds the land and infrastructure separately from the construction company, with an external trustee, Fiducapital, administering every payment and reporting quarterly. It is the single most important structural decision of the year: the land that secures the project is now held where it cannot be touched by anything else.

A full unit-by-unit construction schedule for Nomad City 1A is issued to buyers in English and Polish, with foundations complete on the first three houses and a dated shell-core stage set for each unit in the phase. Every owner knows where their own house sits in the programme.

In the same month an Investors' Committee is established, chaired by Piotr Baran — chief executive and co-owner of the Polish developer PCG S.A. and a board member of the Polish Association of Real Estate Developers — bringing thirty years of development governance to the table.

Roughly 207,000 m² across four plots is brought under the Trust. Seven reservation agreements are signed at an average of US$75/m² — above the underwriting assumption of US$60 — and the first quarterly interest payment is executed to all bondholders. Occupant settlements come in 25% below budget.

A LiDAR survey is flown across some 3.0 million m² of the landholding, producing a centimetre-accurate three-dimensional model of the terrain beneath the tree canopy. Every contour, slope, drainage line and existing tree is captured before a single road is drawn — so the masterplan is laid onto the land the way it actually is, rather than the way a map says it should be.

The build is restructured around specialists rather than a single general contractor: PolBud SRL on structural work, Soluciones Modulares SRL on finishing, and R-Sosa Constructora on roads, infrastructure and houses. Each firm does what it is best at, and the programme stops depending on any one of them.

Holding that together takes a room. Contractors, engineers, architects and the Samana Group team sit around the same table on site every week, with the masterplan on the screen and the week's work in front of them.

The Nomad City feasibility study is finalised in February. Alongside it, an independent Commercial Feasibility and Financial Pre-Feasibility Study of the wider Costa Samaná landholding is commissioned from Analixis Global — a specialist brand of Castillo Zavala Construction & Investments, whose clients are the developers, banks and funds of the Dominican market. It is built on field research carried out between January and May 2026 and a review of 35 comparable projects.

It rated market attractiveness High, with an overall evaluation of favorable, with conditions — and, more usefully, it independently arrived at the strategy the project had already chosen: low-density eco-luxury and wellness positioning, villas and boutique apartments with hospitality-grade operations, phased and self-sufficient execution, and European and North American second-home, lifestyle and eco-wellness buyers as the core market.

The conditions it attaches are the institutional steps still in progress — MITUR parameters, environmental permitting for the wider landholding, and CONFOTUR classification — before the masterplan is finalised or sales open at scale.

Advanced structural works run across Phase 1A — main floor slabs poured, foundation bases completed, engineered plot platforms prepared. In Phase 1B, earthworks start: road profiling and the first underground utility routes.

The construction permit certificate is issued and enters the CONFOTUR application dossier, joining the municipal construction permit of November 2024 and the environmental permit of July 2025. Guzmán Ariza — one of the country's leading firms — takes the Nomad City masterplan permitting mandate in September.

The Trust brings roughly 876,500 m² under control in a single quarter, including its first beachfront parcel. Around 43% of capital deployment goes to land acquisition and 38% to land development and infrastructure — money going into the ground, not into overhead.

An integrated execution partnership is signed with a consortium led by R-Sosa Constructora, alongside Soluciones Modulares, BIRSA Electric and Ricardo Cruz & Associates. Fifty residential units are delivered and paid for on delivery rather than in advance — the contractor carries the construction financing — with insurance behind the structure. Management believes no other developer in the Dominican Republic has put comparable terms in place.

R-Sosa built the main road from Samaná town up to Monte Rojo. The same team now delivers Nomad City's own four kilometres of primary roads — stormwater drainage, potable water, electrical service, public lighting and fibre to every plot — and builds houses alongside Soluciones Modulares.

A fortnight later R-Sosa posted their own film about the project, on their own channel — "nos enorgullece ser la empresa responsable de desarrollar toda la infraestructura": proud to be the company responsible for developing the entire infrastructure. A contractor putting their name to a project on their own account, unprompted, is worth more than any line we could write about them.

The public lighting grid is installed and operational across Nomad City 1A, on solar streetlights along the main roads. Main interior works are completed on the first reference home, several houses reach advanced enclosed structural stage, and plot preparation extends into Nomad City 1B.

Structural works are complete on the first three Phase 1A houses. Eighteen further houses are at foundation stage, Phase 1B foundation work is underway, and the first panoramic window frames go in.

Pro-Ambiente J&M, S.A. delivers an independent environmental pre-feasibility study covering geology, ecology and hydrology, and rates 60–65% of the initial area suitable for immediate development.

Its most interesting finding concerns the Bahía Carenero wetland, which it rates unsuitable for building. Rather than write the land off, the plan changed around it: acquire it at a materially reduced price, keep it permanently as a protected ecological reserve, and move the commercial area onto higher, more stable ground the study itself recommends. A constraint became an amenity few developments in the region can offer.

Nomad City gets its own route to the sea: roughly 1.3 km, a seven-minute buggy ride from the ridge down to the beach club. Buggy-passable today, street-quality by the end of the year. It looks like very little on video and represents a year of work, negotiation and permitting.

A concrete drainage channel, carrying water safely away from the road every time tropical rain hits. It will never appear on a postcard from Samaná. On a mountain site it is the difference between a road that lasts decades and a road that washes out in the first serious storm.

The modular build comes into its own: advanced prefabrication, premium materials and factory quality control mean a complete home can be ready in about nine weeks once its platform and services are in.

Prefabrication is an option, not a rule. Buyers who want the speed and the factory tolerances choose it; those who prefer conventional cast-in-place construction get that instead, to the same specification and on the same plots. Both are built by the same consortium.

N80 stands complete at shell core: roof on, full-height glazing and sliding doors installed, stone plinth laid, floors down, internal doors hung and the terrace poured. It is the clearest picture yet of what a Flat House is — a long, low volume that opens along its whole seaward side to Samana Bay.

N06 is offered as a nearly ready Flat House in Nomad City I — a 956 m² plot, two bedrooms, more than 50 m² of terrace. The first unit offered on the basis of what has been built rather than what is planned.

By this point five Phase 1A houses stand structurally complete — N04, N05 and N06 on the first terrace, joined by N70 and N80 — with the rest of the fifty-unit programme moving up behind them.

Samana Group and Banco BDI have entered a partnership to offer mortgage financing to Nomad City buyers — including foreign buyers, which is the part that rarely exists in this market.

The facility covers up to 70% of the property value, in US dollars, with funds released progressively against construction milestones rather than in a single drawdown, at indicative rates quoted by the bank in the 8–10% range. Every application is assessed and approved by BDI on its own terms.

For a buyer it changes the arithmetic of owning here: a Flat House stops being an all-cash purchase and becomes a financed one, on the same basis a home is bought anywhere else. For the project it is something else again — a Dominican bank underwriting lending against these houses, on this land, is an institution putting its own balance sheet behind the title work, the permits and the build quality.

Work moves along the terrace to the houses in the 60–80 range. Slabs are poured on block plinths cut into the slope, each with its service pit formed and drainage run before the concrete goes down — the same sequence that carried the first houses to shell core. Street lighting and the finished houses behind them are already in place.