When Derek Ferguson traveled to Costa Rica in 1998 for a surfing trip, he met a man who’d built a house there 20 years earlier.

“By 1998 he was a kind of crazy person, living in the jungle,” Ferguson says, but the man was charming enough that, after some negotiation, Ferguson bought his house and land—about 17 acres—for $250,000. “That was considered quite a bit of money at the time,” he says.

Within six years he’d come to own almost 200 times that amount of land, creating, over time, Finca Rio Oro—a ranch he named after the river that runs through the property. “I just sort of fell in love with Costa Rica,” he says, “and I fell in love with the idea of sustainability.”

At the time of his first land purchase, Ferguson was a partner at Integrated Studios, a film and sound production company in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. He’d had some experience with land management through his family, descendants and owners of the Lykes Brothers agribusiness, which has more than 575,000 acres of land in Florida and Texas. “I had some idea of what was going on with agriculture, but not really,” he says.

So when five large farms near his house, totaling more than 1,800 acres, came up for sale three years later, “I saw an opportunity,” he says, and he bought all of them.

The transaction wasn’t straightforward. There were four major landowners and a smattering of people who had dubious, if troublesome, claims. “I bought one waterfall a couple of times,” Ferguson says. “There were gold miners who had some claims to it.” A senator, several subsistence farmers, and a banker also claimed various plots; Ferguson duly paid them in an effort to “get everything up to American standards of legality,” he says.

When more adjacent properties came up for sale, Ferguson bought those, too. By 2004 he’d completed his acquisitions and found himself owner of a 3,300-acre ranch, which is roughly 5 miles wide and 6 miles long. He declined to say exactly how much he spent on the land, saying only that it cost “several million” dollars.

Fourteen years later he’s put it on the market, listing it for $24 million with Bill McDavid of Hall & Hall. “It’s priced at a very competitive number,” Ferguson says. “You can’t find anything in Costa Rica like it, much less a contiguous property.”

What He Bought
The property includes a mile and a half of completely untouched beachfront, though it’s bordered by 8 miles of beaches accessible only via his land. There’s an old airstrip, a river, multiple creeks and waterfalls, and copious freshwater springs.

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