After looking and looking and looking – near Victoria, Canada, all over Costa Rica, and through some parts of Colombia, it makes the most sense and seems to be the best fit for us. We’re going to end up with family in Victoria, Florida, Switzerland, and Cali, so it made sense to be close to one of those family groups! We’ll actually be about 20 minutes outside Cali on the lot we purchased in 2019. We were trying to sell it didn’t, we still very much like it, and so why not? There is no perfect place, so why not the lot we love?

There are some downsides – no place is perfect. Our lot is great for walking…in nature and by farms. There are no stores or restaurants within walking distance. On the other hand, we can design and build our own home, and are hoping to use passive and active solar to eliminate any need for air conditioning and any electricity bills. Here’s a short video showing a view from the lot as if you were standing in the future house.

The lot is 9,000 square metres (2.2 acres), so we can have fruit trees, a garden and so on! It’s in a gated complex, so perhaps I should explain that.

Security in Cali

There are two ways that people live in Cali and in most cities in Colombia: In gated complexes or in barrios. Gated complexes include places like ours and Wilmer and Islena’s, where everyone has a big lot. There is typically a big fence around the whole complex and a gate with 24-hour guards for entry and exit. They also include the apartment where we currently live in a five-storey building, part of a complex of 4 buildings, 70 apartments in all. It has a big fence and a gate with 24-hour security. Elvia lives on the second floor of a seventeen storey building, one of two towers in her complex.

Most complexes come with additional social features like swimming pools and gyms, a social room you can borrow, and so on.

The alternative is a barrio. If you have negative connotations about barrios from American movies, barrio just means neighbourhood. It’s like Gordon Head in Victoria or Rosedale in Toronto. Some are better than others, obviously, but they all work roughly the same way. Barrios consist of rows of adjacent houses – row houses but each one is unique. Most have a small front yard, many have tree-lined streets.

Here’s a street in the Prados del Norte barrio in the north of Cali. (We’re in the south). Apologies for the quality, I wasn’t expecting to post this one. Close to the end, note the little white hut. That is for a vigilante, which does not have the same meaning in Spanish! Each street has a man with a heavy-duty billy club who patrols the area day and night. (Obviously not the same man.)

You can sort-of see that the houses have some sort of bars in front for security. I have noticed that the height and extent of these bars has been declining since I first came in 2004. As more people accept that security has improved, they don’t bother as much with bars and fences. Our property has a gated entry, but anybody could walk across the fields and into the complex. The only thing between our lot and the neighbouring field is a standard barbed wire fence to keep the cows in.

Lomas del Viento

Our complex is called Lomas del Viento. The people who owned the land are farmers developing some of it. They created two complexes, ours and Lomas del Rio, each with 50 lots. It looks like our area will remain forever rural, but who knows.

One reason we purchased this lot was because the regulations stipulate that nature is to be respected. For example, even though lots range from 6,000 – 12,000 square metres, there can be only one house with a maximum footprint of 300 square metres, two stories maximum. The water comes from a river that runs through the property. You must capture rainwater from your house to use for irrigation, washing cars, and so on. While a garden is fine, native plants are to populate the rest of the lot. That sort of thing.

The image below is a low-resolution (all I have) shot of Lomas del Viento – we are #4. You can see Lomas del Rio indicated in the upper right, but not even yet planned out when this brochure was made – it has been created now. The owners had big plans, but I have a feeling many of them are not going to happen. The orange rectangle was meant to be a polo field – apparently people still do that down here. I don’t believe it exists yet. The red rectangle labelled Amatista was intended to be a day-use facility for 100 seniors. There’s a hard-to-see red rectangle on the left that indicates a mini-mall, but I can’t imagine how it could survive. There are only ~100 houses nearby. I’m not optimistic these will ever get built, but they don’t really matter to us, either. Though we might want to use the senior facility one day…

That’s about it, folks. We will start working with an architect soon to design the house, and with luck we could be in it for Christmas! We don’t know much about the house yet beyond the usual – it will have three bedrooms, etc. One bedroom is for us, one will double for an office, and one is for you to come and visit!

If you do visit after the house is built, you should know that we decided against a swimming pool. They are very common here because it’s hot, but we found we hardly use the ones we have access to. We haven’t used the one in our apartment complex yet. Also, we are hoping Lomas del Viento is slightly cooler than Cali, and the passively-cooled solar house definitely should be comfortable. There usually seems to be a breeze – hence the name, which means ‘hills of the wind,’ according to Google translate.

We’re really looking forward to designing our own house. That’s definitely a dream come true. There are also 9,000 square metres to do something with, so we’ll be consulting local experts to figure out what trees and shrubs we want. We should be able to surround ourselves with beautiful tropical plants. I’ll post more when we know more! The architect figures the design phase will take 2-3 months, so there should be good stuff soon!

In the meantime, here’s some Sanji. Here he was as a puppy.

And here is starting to play again post-surgery. He had The operation. His parents hoped it would make him less aggressive towards certain dogs, but no luck. With most dogs, he’s fine, but some dogs….

And finally his usual resting pose.