All Islands For Sale

The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The same archipelago, the same limestone karst rising out of the same blue. The difference is how few people have heard of Culion, and how completely those waters have remained themselves as a result. Culion was sealed off from the world for exactly one hundred years, from 1906 until the World Health Organization declared the island leprosy-free in 2006. A century of low development is rare on a tropical archipelago. The reefs survived it. The mangroves survived it. The light on the water in the late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the karst islands to the west, is what tropical light was before tourism found the tropics. Today the local tourism office uses one official phrase to describe Culion: *Paradise Regained*. The town keeps a coral-rock church built in the 1700s from blocks of fossilised reef, a 1740 Spanish fort, and an archive inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. The bay holds Japanese WWII shipwrecks now overgrown with coral, ranked among the finest wreck dives in the world. This listing covers two adjacent islets in those waters, near the well-known sandbar of Cheron Island, in the same bay as the overwater bungalows of Two Seasons Coron Island Resort. ## The Land Two lots. One acre between them. - **Lot A:** 2,360 sqm - **Lot B:** 1,653 sqm - **Combined:** 4,013 sqm These are not large parcels. They are intimate ones, the size where a thoughtful house, a swimming dock, and a small garden are exactly enough, and where every step takes you closer to the water rather than further from it. The water itself is the asset. Calamian water is the kind divers fly across continents to find: clear enough at noon to read a book through, warm year-round, and full of life. From your own dock you will see schools of needlefish in the shallows and, on still mornings, the silhouettes of the karst islands of Coron Bay rising in the distance like an unfinished sentence. ## What Surrounds You **Two Seasons Coron Island Resort & Spa** sits in the same bay, with overwater bungalows, a private beach, and a full spa. Owners building on islands in this part of Palawan often use a resort like this as their base during construction, and as overflow for the kind of guests who want a proper bed within walking distance of the bar. **Culion town** is a 30-minute speedboat ride away. The plaza, the coral-rock Immaculate Conception Church, the museum with its UNESCO-inscribed archives, the small market, the easy rhythm of a place that knows exactly what it is. **Coron town** sits across the strait for shopping, restaurants, and onward connections. **The reefs and lagoons** of Kayangan Lake, Twin Lagoons, Barracuda Lake, and the wrecks of Coron Bay are all within day-trip range of your own dock. ## Access - **By air:** Manila or Cebu to Francisco B. Reyes Airport on Busuanga Island. Roughly 75 minutes from Manila, daily flights. - **From the airport:** Van and boat transfer to Culion, then a smaller boat to the islets. - **Once in the Calamians:** Boats are the road network, and a small private boat is part of the pleasure of an island home here. --- The waters around Culion are the same waters around Coron. The difference, for now, is how few people have heard of Culion.

Selma Lagerlöf called Sörmland *Sweden's pleasure garden*. From Myrholmen's docks, you understand why before your coffee cools. The island sits in Djulösjön, the lake at the heart of a province that holds 400 lakes and as many castles. Across the water, the white facade of Stora Djulö Manor has stood since the 1720s, on grounds first recorded in 1334. Lagerlöf wrote that very view into *The Wonderful Adventures of Nils* as the *Beautiful Pleasure Garden*, where Nils Holgersson rested on his journey across Sweden. From your dock, you see what he saw. ## What Myrholmen Is A small island. The name itself tells you so. *Holmen* means islet, and Myrholmen earns the word. You can walk its perimeter in minutes. But small means intimate, not constrained. There are docks in three directions: east for morning light, south for the long Swedish afternoon, west for sunsets that linger past ten in June. Wherever the day puts you, the sun is there too. ## The Buildings Four structures, each doing its job without apology. **The main house** holds the master bedroom, with space for a double and a single bed, and the kitchen. The kitchen runs on gas: a stove, a fridge, and a freezer compartment, all powered without a wire to the mainland. Off-grid by design, not by compromise. **The guest cottage** adds three more sleeping places. Six guests in total, with no one giving up a bed. **The sauna** is wood-fired. The cool Nordic summer night demands it; the lake, three steps away, finishes the job. Swedes built an entire summer culture around this single ritual, and on Myrholmen you have it to yourself. The fourth building houses a dry toilet, the unglamorous detail that makes a freshwater island work. ## The Setting You are three kilometres from the centre of Katrineholm, and a short row from Stora Djulö Manor itself, which now operates a café, restaurant, and ice cream bar with outdoor seating along the same shore you wake up to. The Djulö canoe club shares that shoreline. So does the manor's medieval stable, now a folk museum, and a hostel run inside the old red estate buildings, the oldest dating from the 1600s. Beyond Djulösjön lies all of Sörmland: roughly 400 manor houses (more than any other Swedish province), the 1,000-kilometre Sörmlandsleden hiking trail, deer and wild boar in the forests, and the white water-lily (the provincial flower) opening in the quieter bays of your own lake. The regional tourism board calls it *Stockholm Country Break*. It is the countryside that Stockholm itself escapes to. ## The Practicalities - **Stockholm Central to Katrineholm:** 52 minutes by direct train, hourly service, every day of the year. - **Skavsta Airport** is closer still, with flights to most of Europe. - **Mainland easements:** three parking spaces and a private dock, so you and your guests reach the island the same way the original owners did. - **Included in the sale:** a rowboat. - **Utilities:** gas-fired appliances throughout; the island is off-grid by design. The arithmetic is simple. You leave Stockholm after a Friday meeting, reach Katrineholm in under an hour, row across, and have your feet in the lake before the sun touches the pines. ## What You Are Buying Not a mansion. Not a compound. A small island with everything a thoughtful Swedish family would build for a hundred summers, and nothing they would not. Selma Lagerlöf was right about the pleasure garden. Myrholmen is the part she did not put in the book.

Roughly twenty-three thousand years ago, the northeast flank of the Mombacho volcano collapsed and slid, in a single catastrophic afternoon, into the lake at its feet. The debris travelled twelve kilometres before it stopped. When it did, the higher points of the avalanche remained above water as 365 small green hummocks, each one a former piece of the volcano's slope. This is Las Isletas de Granada. The archipelago is among the most distinctive in the world, geologically speaking: an entire island chain that was once the side of a single mountain. The mountain itself, still active enough to vent sulfur from its summit fumaroles, looks down on the islets today from across the water. The colonial city of Granada, founded by the Spanish in 1524 and the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded settlement in mainland America, sits twenty minutes from the islets by boat. Isleta El Paraíso, *the paradise*, is one of those 365 islets, available now. ## The Property Approximately one acre of palm-shaded, lake-fringed Nicaraguan island, dressed in native flora and decorative gardens that have been thoughtfully integrated into the island's tropical character. The improvements include: - **Two bungalows**, comprising three bedrooms in total across both - A **ranch-style outdoor pavilion**, suitable for dining, gathering, and the kind of long lake-front afternoon the islets are built for - A **separate caretaker's house** for resident on-island staff - **Piped electrical service** to the island - A **large water storage tank** for freshwater supply - All furnishings included with the sale The arrangement is small but complete. A family can occupy the island as a primary or secondary residence with the existing infrastructure, and the caretaker's quarters allow year-round maintenance whether the owners are in residence or abroad. ## The Setting Las Isletas de Granada is the rare private-island archipelago where the islands are a normal part of regional life rather than an isolated luxury enclave. The islets host a community of around 1,200 residents, including local Nicaraguan families, expatriates from the Americas and Europe, several boutique ecolodges and restaurants, a 16th-century Spanish fort, and even a small lakeshore school. Boats move between the islets the way cars move along a street in a small town. The everyday rhythm is gentle, neighbourly, and characteristically Nicaraguan. What makes the position remarkable is the backdrop. **Mombacho Volcano** rises 1,344 metres directly behind the archipelago, cloaked in cloud forest at its summit and protected as the Mombacho Volcano Nature Reserve. The reserve protects 457 plant species, 87 species of orchid, 186 bird species, and several creatures found nowhere else on earth, including the endemic Mombacho salamander and the Mombacho butterfly. Day hikes from Granada lead through the cloud forest to vantage points overlooking the islets and the lake. **Lake Nicaragua (Lago Cocibolca)** is the largest lake in Central America, 8,264 square kilometres of fresh water, with **Ometepe Island** and its twin volcanoes visible on the horizon on clear days. The lake is one of only a small handful in the world that historically supported a freshwater shark population. **Granada**, the colonial city, lies twenty minutes north by boat. The streets are cobblestoned, the cathedral pink, the architecture restored, and the restaurant scene one of the most refined in Central America. Cafés in colonial courtyards. Galleries in former merchant houses. A daily market that has been operating since before American independence. **Masaya Volcano**, an active basaltic shield with a permanently glowing lava lake at the bottom of its main crater, lies 30 minutes inland. Night tours descend to the crater rim while the lava is visible. **Managua International Airport** is approximately 45 minutes from Granada by car, with direct flights from Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Panama City, San José, Mexico City, and Madrid. ## A Day, In Sketch Mornings on the islets begin with mist rising off the lake and the call of howler monkeys from the surrounding islands. Boats from Granada cross the water to the city's markets and back. Egrets and herons stalk the shallow water at the island's edge. Pelicans and cormorants wheel overhead. A family of mantled howler monkeys lives a few islets across. Breakfast on the ranch pavilion. Coffee, fresh fruit, *gallo pinto* if the resident cook is preparing it. The lake mirror-flat in the early hours, the silhouette of Mombacho beginning to take shape as the cloud burns off. The day is whatever the owners choose. A boat into Granada for lunch in a colonial courtyard. A hike up Mombacho's cloud forest trails. A kayak through the maze of channels between the neighbouring islets. A book in a hammock on a small private beach. Late afternoon, the light over the water turns gold, and the volcano's profile darkens against the western sky. Dinner can be on the island or in Granada. The boat ride home in the dark, with the lights of the colonial city behind you and the silent dark of the lake ahead, is one of the experiences Las Isletas residents tend to mention first when describing why they live here. ## The Position for the Next Owner This is the entry tier of the private-island market and is priced accordingly. A one-acre Nicaraguan island with two bungalows, a caretaker's residence, full utilities, and the geographic and cultural assets of the Granada region attached to it is one of the more accessible ways to acquire a freehold tropical island anywhere in the world. The property is suitable as: - A **primary residence** for a buyer relocating to or retiring in Nicaragua's most established expatriate region - A **part-time or seasonal residence** for a buyer based in North America or Europe, with the caretaker maintaining the property during absences - A **boutique vacation rental**, with two bungalows and the ranch pavilion already configured for hosting guests - A **small ecolodge expansion** integrated with the existing tourism infrastructure of Las Isletas Nicaragua welcomes foreign buyers under straightforward property law, with no nationality restrictions on private residential real estate ownership outside the autonomous coastal regions. A licensed Nicaraguan notary handles transfer, and a local property lawyer is recommended for any cross-border transaction. ## Access - **From Managua's Augusto C. Sandino International Airport:** approximately 45 minutes by car to Granada - **From Granada to Las Isletas:** approximately 15 to 20 minutes by panga (small motorboat) from Puerto Asese or one of the other lakefront marinas - **From the islets boat docks to Isleta El Paraíso:** a short final crossing among the channels of the archipelago A buyer arriving in Managua in the morning is on the island by lunch. --- Las Isletas de Granada was a single volcano's slope before it became 365 islands. Now one of those islands, with two bungalows and an acre of palm shade and a view of where the original mountain stands, is for sale.