One of Puerto Rico’s most sensitive ecological corridors will soon be taken over by a proposed $2.6 billion luxury tourism and residential megaproject. Esencia, involving 1,504 acres of luxury real estate, will be constructed in Boquerón, in the island’s southwestern municipality of Cabo Rojo. The developers, Three Rules Capital and the Reuben Brothers, are paving the way for the project, hoping to build 530 hotel units, 1,132 luxury tourist residences, a school with over 500 dormitories, various commercial spaces, two high-end golf courses, and more profitable amenities—all aimed at attracting affluent foreigners and investors.
Rather than creating a sustainable and prosperous community for residents, Esencia threatens to transform Cabo Rojo into an enclave economy, relegating residents into the margins and entrapping them in low-wage, unstable service sector jobs with little possibility of long-term advancement. Concurrently, most of the subsidization for the project comes from public tax credits or funds, even though close to 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s total population lives below the federal poverty line, and the island remains in a state of bankruptcy.
In effect, the Puerto Rican public is being forced to fund the destruction of its own land for a gated private paradise, geared towards wealthy outsiders. The reality is simple: Esencia is a predatory development and colonial-style enclave, fundamentally engineered to benefit foreign billionaires and deprioritize the rights and needs of Puerto Rican citizens.
Esencia is yet another in a long string of the developers’ past extractivist projects. Across the world, the Reuben Brothers and Three Rules Capital’s project developments have depleted local resources, caused “environmental degradation,” and obstructed public beach access for locals. In Baja California Sur, a northwest Mexican state, Esencia’s developers altered coastlines and damaged native mangroves to ensure their new luxury enclaves had desalinated water access— even though surrounding residents often had to wait weeks for water delivery. This exploitative development model is actively being replicated with Esencia: Investors will buy land with considerable ecological value, leverage political and economic incentives to build luxury developments, and pass all of the social costs onto local communities.
The narrative of transparency, environmental authority, and community-based inclusion being spun by the developers of the project is actively undermined by the behaviour of Esencia’s architects, Ricardo Álvarez-Díaz and Cristina Villalón, who appear to be cozying up to the officials and regulators who would directly oversee their work. They attended a fundraising event for current governor of the island Jenniffer González, and donated $25,000 to the Democracia es Prosperidad Committee, a Super Political Action Committee which supports candidates to the House of Representatives and Senate who “advocate for a “free market” economy”.
These elected officials also appoint the members of the Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, the body responsible for enforcing the Plan de Uso de Terrenos, which dictates how land is used in compliance with environmental standards. The plan has designated the land Esencia is to be developed on as ecologically sensitive, meaning it should not be built upon at all— but the architects of Esencia’s financial support of officials on key regulatory bodies raises some doubts about whether the plan will be honored. They are also not the only senior figures on the Esencia team to have political ties: Roberto Cacho Pérez, a developer for Cabo Rojo Land Acquisition and one of the entities involved in Esencia’s development, made a $76,800 donation to the Super PAC known as Salvemos a Puerto Rico. The committee previously financially supported the ex-governor of the island, Pedro Pierluisi, who was in charge of initial-phase dynamics for Esencia.
The project’s developers also demonstrate a complete disregard for the fragile state of nearby natural resources and ecosystems. The development is projected to consume 1.25 million gallons of water per day, which is 28 percent of Cabo Rojo’s daily water supply. Environmental groups such as the Comité Caborrojeño Pro Salud y Ambiente, as well as Amigxs del Mar, warn that Esencia will exacerbate the municipality’s existing water issues. Some nearby residents already experience water outages due to the constant influx of visitors, which will only be aggravated by the implementation of Esencia. In addition, the development would directly impact 77 percent of the land it would be built on, threatening habitats harboring various endangered species such as the guabairo, a native bird, or the Antillean manatee. Neglecting to account for the fragility of Puerto Rico’s ecosystems, developers bulldoze ahead with a destructive project that serves only to create an exclusive retreat for the wealthy.
This pattern of erasure extends beyond endangered species, as Esencia threatens to engulf sites of cultural importance for Puerto Rico’s Indigenous peoples, erasing layers of the island’s cultural heritage and historical memory. The development is set to be built atop at least 24 colonial and pre-colonial or Indigenous (also known as Taíno) archaeological sites, putting them at risk for irreversible loss. In this way, Esencia echoes earlier exploitative colonial practices taking place on the island during periods of Spanish colonization in the 15th and 16th centuries. Spanish settlers imposed the encomienda system by dismantling Indigenous cacique systems of governance, enslaving Indigenous communities, and extracting their resources. This, combined with the spread of European diseases, contributed to the decimation of 70 to 85 percent of the Indigenous population, accelerating their near-complete erasure—all while the Spaniards legitimized their rule under the pretense of establishing a “civilization.”
The colonial logic of extraction was later reconfigured through US economic policies, creating a toxic state of dependency for Puerto Rico and restructuring the island’s economy in ways that have reinforced inequality since the island’s annexation in 1898. Through the Jones Act, Puerto Rico is required to transport goods to the mainland solely on US ships, further stagnating Puerto Rico’s commercial economy. In 1976, the US implemented the Internal Revenue Code Section 936 to incentivise US companies to operate on the island; when repealed in 1996 and fully phased out in 2006, US corporations left, worsening the island’s debt crisis. In response to the mounting debt, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was instituted, which has since reduced some of their debt at the expense of spending cuts to pensions funds and public services like education and health care. To stimulate the economy, policies such as Act 60 have been enacted, allowing foreigners to enjoy capital gains on the island—exempt from paying federal and local taxes. But these incentives have continued to encourage foreign investors to pursue projects that prioritize profit over the needs of local communities and the environment, further systematically entrenching the extractive patterns historically imposed by colonial powers.
Esencia represents a model of growth that ravenously extracts land, water, and public funds to build a private enclave for foreign investors and elites, leaving communities to bear the environmental and economic costs. At a time when Puerto Rico’s environment and economy face increasing strain, funding this megaproject reveals whose interests are of the utmost importance. If Esencia is developed, it will not just change Cabo Rojo’s physical landscape; it will engender an extractivist system rooted in colonial history, where public sacrifice and suffering are tolerated for private gain by elites.