Nicaragua: A Paradise Poised for Discovery

September 5, 2014

Published by Condé Nast Traveler

Yvan Cussigh came to Nicaragua in the most circuitous way—after fantasizing about Costa Rica for 25 years. As a young man, he’d been given a Costa Rican five-colón note by a friend and was captivated by the bill’s bucolic scene of farmers and fishermen—as if Brueghel had painted in the tropics. “It was so beautiful, and I thought, one day I’m going to go there,” explains the Italian-born, Swiss-raised Cussigh as he fishes out the sacred talisman from his wallet to show me.

After that, Cussigh, who ran New York City nightlife spots such as Bar d’O and the rooftop bar at 60 Thompson, spent years vacationing in Costa Rica. During one torrential visit in 2008, he asked his travel agent to book him a cheap ticket to somewhere dry, and soon enough he found himself in Nicaragua, in the picturesque, if slightly faded, colonial town of Granada. Its old-world charms—tree-filled plazas, cobblestoned streets, prominent churches, a promenade overlooking Lake Nicaragua, the country’s biggest lake—enchanted him immediately. “It wasn’t just the perfectly painted pastel houses,” he says. “It was the old ladies who’d pull their rocking chairs onto the sidewalk and watch the street life. It reminded me of my own grandmother back in Italy.”

Not only was Cussigh inspired to put down roots, he wanted to build something. And so he called his childhood friend Jean-Marc Houmard, owner of some of downtown Manhattan’s buzziest spots, including Acme, Bond Street, and fashion-world favorite Indochine. “Having a small hotel in an exotic land was always on my mind,” Houmard says. “Part of the appeal of Nicaragua is that it’s not overdone or too perfect. There’s a sense of discovery.”

Last winter, Cussigh and Houmard found a spot for their new hotel, the Tribal, in a building in the center of Granada that was once an artisan co-op. At first, they tried to renovate the structure, but “nothing was salvageable,” says Houmard. They would have to build from the ground up—no easy task. “I thought my Spanish was decent,” Cussigh tells me, “but then I realized that I didn’t know the words for septic tank.” Still, starting from scratch allowed them to get creative: Instead of a traditional colonial look, which Houmard says can be “a bit austere,” they created a hybrid of a colonial house, a country farm, and a mini urban resort.

The resulting hotel is an elegant pastiche of global influences: The white-washed walls are inspired by the oldest house in Granada, and the black-and-white pattern on the stairs is modeled on fabric brought back from Kenya. The pool’s floor takes its cue from Roberto Burle Marx’s swirling mosaics that line Rio’s Copacabana, while the terraces are decorated with kilims from Turkey. There are touches of New York, too: The enormous painting in the lobby, for instance, is a Basquiat-like collage of downtown Manhattan that once hung in 60 Thompson. “Jean-Marc took it off the frame, rolled it up in a surfboard bag, and brought it down,” Cussigh explains. Before each visit to Granada, Houmard would fill his bag with fabrics for banquettes and beds.

Cussigh and Houmard are hardly the only ones to discover a sense of possibility in Nicaragua. A growing number of entrepreneurs—natives and expats, savvy businessmen and small-scale dreamers—have started making investments across the country, particularly in Granada and points south, along Lake Nicaragua and down the coast to the fishing villages of San Juan del Sur. They’re restoring crumbling haciendas, opening high-end ecolodges, setting up boho-chic surf shacks, and in the process paving the way for a new kind of Nicaraguan traveler.

For a long time after the Sandinista revolution and ten-year civil war against the Contras ended in 1990, the majority of foreign tourists were adventurous surfers and European backpackers who weren’t bothered by a little danger and a lack of modern amenities. Now, visitors are finding a country that’s on the rise as a tourist destination—that sweet spot where there’s little large-scale development yet a high level of style and comfort, not to mention stability (Nicaragua is among the safest countries in the region today). It’s the kind of perfect mix that moved Carlos Pellas, one of the country’s wealthiest industrialists, to open the luxury resort Mukul on the Pacific coast north of San Juan del Sur in 2013. The $250 million project includes luxurious villas (each with its own plunge pool), six spas, a world-class golf course, and a future airstrip.

On a day-trip from Granada, I head 60 miles south to Maderas Village, a beachside surf lodge near San Juan del Sur. (Most travelers spend time in both Granada and San Juan del Sur.) Here I meet Dave Grossman, a 31-year-old former Manhattan lawyer who opened the 20-room hotel in 2011 with Toronto transplant Matt “Dickie” Dickinson, also 31. “Over three bottles of rum and 100 hours of conversation, we realized that our goals aligned,” recalls Grossman. They scraped together seed money, found a third partner with experience in construction, and built their first palapas.