A Sustainable Jungle Lodge & Chocolate Farm in the Heart of the Jungle
La Loma is a sustainably built jungle lodge on Isla Bastimentos, set on 55 acres of rainforest and farmland. With handcrafted open-air bungalows and a working chocolate farm, it’s designed to share the island’s natural beauty while protecting its environment and supporting local livelihoods.
Our Origin Story
After enduring a particularly horrible winter, Maggie Ann and Enrique Escudero packed up their lives in England and moved to Panama with a vision of living off grid, building a life that was in tune with the environment and local communities and sharing this with others. In 2003 they purchased some land in Bahia Honda from Enrique Stephenson, a local legend who had farmed pigs, corn, coconuts, and cacao on the property for the previous 50 years. The deal, sealed over a jungle brewed ‘whiskey’, established a lasting friendship between the three and La Loma started to become a reality.
After camping on the land for many months, establishing friendships in the local community and getting ‘comfortable’ with the fauna of the area, they gathered a team of local builders and set to work. With a commitment to minimizing impact on the environment, maximizing the support and benefits they could offer to the Bahia Honda Ngabe community and delving into the production of forest grown foods La Loma slowly evolved into a truly immersive and site-specific retreat.
In 2018 spurned by a need to be closer to aging parents in the UK and a jungle-raised son eager to explore the wider world, Maggie and Henry made the difficult decision to move back to Europe. Having known Sebastian and Aaron for many years and been impressed with their work and projects in the area, Maggie and Enrique were thrilled to see the future of La Loma in the hands of a team that would not only continue their mission of environmental stewardship and local engagement at La Loma but expand and grow it further.
These days, Maggie, Enrique and their son Lucho live in Spain, where they continue to work in education, tourism, food production, and gastronomy— swapping cacao and tropical fruits for olives and wine but not for a moment forgetting all they learned from and loved in their tropical home.
Our Continued Mission
Aaron and Sebastian, lifelong friends that grew up in a neighborhood outside of Washington D.C., had moved to Bastimentos is 2014 to buy Palmar Tent Lodge on Red Frog Beach. With no experience in the hospitality industry or living off-grid in the tropics, they turned to Henry and Maggie, who they met early on, for advice on how to solve many of the problems that only arise here in the islands. After years of hard work, plenty of mistakes, repairs and quite a few improvements, they had turned the tent lodge into Palmar Beach Lodge, which is a well run and comfortable lodge that still operates today. Feeling confident with how the business was operating, when Henry and Maggie mentioned they would be moving on, Aaron and Sebastian jumped at the opportunity to take over a place they had always appreciated.
Aaron and Sebastian took over in 2019 with the intention of keeping the heart of La Loma the same while making some modern improvements and putting their own spin on the property. In late 2019 they closed the lodge to build the new reception/restaurant area, expand the permaculture farm, and add the new Rainforest Bungalows. Although, 2020 did not go as expected, the lodge was reopened at the end of 2020. The lodge area and new cabins were designed by Studio Saxe, a sustainable-focused, architecture firm out of Costa Rica. For the farm expansion, Stephen Brooks, owner of Punta Mona, Ecoversity, Ecovilla, and Alegria, to assist with the permaculture design and sourcing of plants. Aaron had taken a permaculture design course from Stephen at Punta Mona in 2019 and formed a close bond. Stephen helped to add an entire new area of the farm and with the help of local cacao consultant, Meivis Ortiz of Mayamei Cacao, improved the existing cacao farm.
