Discovery By A Thousand Cuts
A glance might find only beauty.
Barbuda Ocean Club’s “ultimate Caribbean hideaway” boasts “pristine beaches” and “crystal blue waters.” Guests at Portugal’s Costa Terra Club can enjoy “the ideal luxury getaway,” a place where you can golf, ride, shoot, and “dance barefoot on the beach until way past your bedtime.” Baker’s Bay, in the Bahamas, offers a “luxurious, secluded island retreat” with “spectacular powder-soft beaches and lush tropical flora.”
No matter where you are in the world, the message remains the same: At Discovery Land Company, all roads lead to paradise.
We’ve heard our fair share of pretty words here in Scotland, too. DLC describes the Loch Tay region as “the ultimate outdoor playground,” in which “viridescent hills are whipped into stiff craggy peaks while endless swathes of moss and mist mingle in a hypnotic conjuring act.” Michael Meldman, the company’s founder and CEO, envisions a highland “gem” where “families will explore wide-open pastoral lands on high-powered Can-Am vehicles” and “wakeboard on the lake” before returning to the resort’s sporting club to “curl up by the fire.”
There’s paradise, then; how about that road?
Discovery Land Company purchased Taymouth Castle back in 2018, but only in the last 18 months has the scale of the company’s planned development become clear. In early 2022, DLC established nearly a dozen separate limited companies to handle the land and properties it had acquired. Today, as far as we know, Michael Meldman’s company owns the castle and its grounds, the 7,000-acre Glen Lyon Estate, and a significant number of commercial and residential properties in Kenmore village. Over the next few years, it will transform these holdings into Discovery Land Company’s vision of heaven: 208 residential units and club suites, an 18-hole golf course, luxury restaurant, clubhouse, wellness facility, and an “elaborate outdoor pursuits program.” Like the company’s other resorts, membership fees will run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Properties will cost many millions.
Concerns quickly arose — among locals, neighbours, and visitors alike.
Some pointed out that Discovery Land Company’s consistent emphasis on the privacy of its resorts held disturbing implications for the public’s long-enshrined right of access to the estate grounds; in August 2023, the John Muir Trust’s Wild Places Protection Officer, Fiona Baillie, said that “it is difficult to see how DLC can achieve the kind of exclusivity they appear to be aiming for without restricting access. The potential for a precedent to be set on what is acceptable under our access legislation makes this development a nationally important issue.”
Others voiced their worries about the resort’s impact on the environment. Much of the development has gone forward on the back of a 2011 planning application submitted by one of the castle’s previous owners, meaning that DLC is working under the assumptions made by an Environmental Statement written over a decade ago. At the same time, precious little is known about the true impact of current tree-felling, construction, and development efforts on local wildlife.
Meanwhile, the lack of communication with the locals, total absence of a public masterplan for the project, and utilization of “salami-slicing” tactics in the planning system have caused further unease regarding the company’s opaque tactics. Even today, we remain largely in the dark about DLC’s full intentions.
In light of these concerns (and myriad others), residents from around the loch have attempted to encourage greater public scrutiny of Discovery Land Company’s actions. To that end, we have attended meetings with local and national politicians, launched a petition that garnered some 150,000 signatures, and taken on an ungodly number of media interviews.
More recently, we have attempted to broaden our focus beyond the hills and lochs of Highland Perthshire. DLC owns and operates 35 resorts around the world, and ours is not the only community that struggles beneath the weight of the company’s dreams: We’ve been lucky enough to speak with activists, campaigners, and residents from Barbuda, the Bahamas, Portugal, California, New York, and beyond, all of whom have dealt with, or are currently dealing with, the consequences of a Discovery development.
It’s been a harrowing process. The corporate playbook rarely changes; the same scars always linger. And while it’s not easy to hear the suffering these people have faced, their stories are vital fragments of a greater whole — and only by knowing them can we see the perils ahead.
So here’s what you need to know.
Barbuda
Barbuda is unlike any other country on Earth — not only for its stunning natural beauty and vast array of wildlife, but also for its unique approach to land ownership. According to the 2007 Barbuda Land Act, Barbudans benefit from collective ownership of the island, meaning that any citizen over 18 years old has a right to occupy residential land, graze animals, and use land for commercial purposes. Major developments, once defined by law as anything that requires over $5.4 million of investment, must be approved by a majority of citizens, although the centralized government on Antigua, headed by the doggedly pro-development prime minister Gaston Browne, raised this threshold to $40 million in 2016.
Then, in 2017, Hurricane Irma struck. The storm devastated Barbuda, destroying homes, businesses, and livelihoods, and forcing the island’s residents to evacuate. Construction began while they were gone.
Both Discovery Land Company and its partner company, Peace, Love, and Happiness, employed Irma as the catalyst for the development of a new resort on Barbuda. At first, DLC seemed committed to investing in the island’s recovery: They promised to provide a $10 million fund to rebuild local residences and to construct new housing complexes, the construction of a $1 million triage medical center on Barbuda, a $1 million contribution to the rebuilding of local schools, a $3.5 million lagoon and beach restoration project, an additional $5 million contribution to a new airport on Barbuda, and the purchase of 500–750 beds for shelters and other temporary housing units. Six years later, only one of these promises has been delivered: the funding of the new airport, intended by DLC to accommodate “almost any size private aircraft.” (Built on protected parks and wetlands, the airstrip has, according to residents, been constructed without acquiring local approval or the necessary scientific studies.)
Honestly, you could fill a whole book with the tragic story of DLC’s impact on Barbuda, but the organization Save Barbuda does a superb job of summarizing it: In short, practically all aspects of life on the island — Barbudans’ rights to self-determination, their livelihoods, businesses, and traditions, the well-being of wildlife and flora, the state of the natural coastline, and much, much more — remain under grave threat from the developers. In 2021, representatives from the United Nations expressed their “deep concerns regarding the potential impacts of the Barbuda Ocean Club Project on human rights, including the rights to food, water and sanitation, housing, and a healthy environment, as well as cultural rights.”
Meanwhile, DLC has begun the process of forcing Barbudans off their own land, putting up signs and hiring security to deter anybody from walking on the island’s beaches, which, legally, they have a right to access.
Barbudans have acted as stewards of their home for 180 years, and today they face an existential threat — one best summarised by John Mussington, a local marine biologist and member of the Barbuda Council. “They do not even know what it is they are destroying,” he says, “and that is the most awful thing about it.”
Portugal
The coastline between Troy and Sines, in Portugal’s Alentejo territory, marks “one of the last strongholds of the wild Iberian coast.” It’s home to 65 kilometres of virgin beaches, one of Europe’s few remaining dune cordons, and a rare biome of endemic and threatened flora species, many of which are protected at EU level. So why wouldn’t you want to build a golf course on it?
Early development in the region began back in the 1970s, when the Estado Novo dictatorship announced the commencement of the “largest tourist enterprise ever” on the very tip of the Trojan peninsula. While the regime’s fall put an end to those plans, the seeds of mega-tourism had been planted in the dunes of Alentejo. Spurred on by the efforts of the Portuguese government circa 2010, eight vast development projects have been constructed along the coast in the last decade, prompting the foundation of Dunas Livres — or the “Free Dunes” movement.
Discovery Land Company’s little slice of Alentejo is known as Costa Terra. DLC describes this resort as a self-contained community centered around a 300-property village (including bistro, coffeeshop, space facilities, boutique hotel and general store, all exclusive to members), stretching along “the last untouched Atlantic coast in Southern Europe.”
DLC built Costa Terra using a planning application previously approved for the wealthy Queiroz Pereira family, which had included a number of hotels, golf course, houses, and tourist villages. This, of course, meant that the Environmental Impact Statement carried out for the project dated back to July 13th, 2005, making it 16 years old at the beginning of DLC’s development. And the company clearly took advantage of this strategy: In an issue of Discovery Life magazine, club CEO John Dwyer boasted that “the construction rights allow the course to be just 500 meters from the ocean, while the vast majority of courses have to be built at least two kilometers away.”
Dunas Livres has long stressed the fragility of the Alentejo coastline, pointing out that the construction and operation of golf courses in an “arid region of sandy subtrate” has proved “scandalous, unnecessary and expensive” for the Portuguese people, while increased urbanization has put pressure on the region’s water resources.
The benefits have been scant, too, as Dunas Livres claim that the seasonal nature of the resort has dampened any benefit it might bring to locals. “The instability of employment,” they say, “accompanied by the ensuing gentrification that one might naturally expect, and the consequent increase in rents for housing within the localities raises doubts as to an effective fixation of young people in this region, with a dense and already aged population.” Google Reviews for Costa Terra, posted by Portuguese accounts, lament DLC’s purchase and closure of a popular public campsite, high prices squeezing out locals, and the ruin of “what was once a beautiful small village.”
Still, the resort did garner one positive review. “Great Food, Awesome Staff, I’d give it 10 stars if I could,” it says. “Anyone complaining clearly hasn’t been inside.”
Lake Tahoe
Described by The Guardian as “one of the last of an old breed of rustic, family-friendly ski resorts in California’s Tahoe region,” Homewood Mountain Resort was purchased by JMA Ventures, a San Francisco-based development company, in 2006. A few years later, JMA won planning permission — no mean feat in California — to reinvent the resort as an overnight destination, “free from crowds,” which would “create the ideal environment for both locals and tourists.” JMA’s master plan, ostensibly written up “for the good of Homewood,” included a market, hardware store, restaurants, amphitheater, ice skating rink, and swimming pool.
For many years, nothing happened.
Then, in early 2022, residents learned that Discovery Land Company had bought into Homewood. That year, “the project began to transform Homewood into a luxury lifestyle club.” The new proposal suggested that, rather than being a revitalized hub for locals, residents would be able to access Homewood “on occasional pre-scheduled community days.” The newly-minted Homewood Mountain & Lake Club will be home to 180 residences, each of which would come with exclusive memberships to the mountain’s ski slopes.
Hoping to prevent the total privatization of one of the last public stretches of shore around Lake Tahoe, local home and business owners formed Keep Homewood Public. Kathy Astromoff, a regular skier at Homewood and organizer for the group, told The Guardian that “the logical end result is that only the richest people will be able to enjoy any of Lake Tahoe if this continues.”
Keep Homewood Public began their campaign by lobbying the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to take a stricter approach to DLC’s development prospects. This involved mass write-ins, local media coverage, and aggressive public messaging, all intended to remind the organisation of its responsibilities to the community. After ramping up the pressure on both DLC and the TRPA, Keep Homewood Public won a rare victory against the developers.
In May 2023, a PR firm representing DLC claimed that some ski passes would be sold to the public after all and committed to opening a few of the facilities proposed by JMA. Keep Homewood Public criticized the company’s “Draft Public Access Plan” for its lack of quantifiable or enforceable commitments to access, however, and called on the TRPA to “force consistency with the Master Plan” and “refrain from expediting permits until certain conditions of approval are met.” Sure enough, a month later, the TRPA announced that the permitting process for redevelopment projects at Homewood had been halted, a decision that will force the developers to resubmit an updated proposal encompassing the entire project.
The long-term consequences of DLC’s planned resort at Homewood have yet to be seen, of course, but Keep Homewood Public’s successful attempt to hold them to account represents a significant step in the right direction for the people of Homewood — and a compelling case study in how to engage with a billion dollar company.
Yellowstone
The Yellowstone Club is no stranger to controversy. Founded by timber baron Tim Blixseth in 1995, the club’s early successes were marred by a number of financial meltdowns in the mid-’00s. In November 2008, Yellowstone defaulted on a $375 million loan, forcing Blixseth to declare bankruptcy and setting him down a road that would, eventually, land him in prison for civil contempt. Discovery Land Company took over operations at Yellowstone in 2009, and, under the guidance of private equity financier Sam Byrne, turned around the club’s fortunes.
Things were mostly quiet at Yellowstone for the next decade — save for the occasional police raid and a few eye-watering fines imposed for illegal activities — but the club found itself under the spotlight in April 2023, when Cottonwood Environmental Law Center issued a lawsuit for violating the Clean Water Act and a number of “criminal and civil nuisance laws.” A PhD scientist hired by Cottonwood determined that Yellowstone’s golf course has been over-irrigated with treated sewage, resulting in nitrogen pollution in nearby streams running 26 times the normal amount. Nitrogen pollution, they pointed out, is a common cause of algae blooms and damage found in river ecosystems, and the nearby Gallatin River had found itself “choked with algae” in previous summers. Eventually, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality placed the West Fork of the Gallatin on its list of water-quality impaired streams.
The Pine Barrens
Discovery Land Company spent many years attempting to secure planning permission to build on the Pine Barrens of Long Island, New York. Their first full application, in 2017, was denied by the Town of Southampton over concerns over the effects of the development on the environment. In 2020, DLC came back with a near-identical proposal, which involved the construction of 118 homes, an 18-hole golf course, spa, restaurant, health club, pools, courts, 10,000-square-foot retail store, and other amenities across 600 acres of woodland — land that was located inside Southampton Town’s “most highly restricted residential zoning.”
Hundreds of community members and at least three conservationist organisations — including Group for the East End, the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, and East Quogue Civic Association — attempted to fight DLC’s development on the untouched Pine Barrens, most recently issuing a suit against the region’s planning board.
According to Group for the East End, locals had fought for nearly a decade “to uphold the residential zoning within the district, which was specifically designed to minimize development, preserve the quality of the drinking water, and protect its unique pine barren habitat and wildlife.”
“The proposed golf resort’s high-density, intensive land use,” they say, “would have a dire effect on the environment.”
Unfortunately, a long war of attrition waged by DLC (in which the most devastating weapon appears to have been the utilization of a $100 million lawsuit levied by the developers against Southampton Town for rejecting their proposal) successfully ground down town officials and helped galvanize the approval of construction. In the aftermath, environmentalists vowed to hold DLC to account during the construction phase, highlighting, in particular, that the planned resort’s location above the area’s sole-source aquifer — a vital supply of drinking water — poses a threat to both residents and local ecosystems.
The Bahamas
The last lines in the story of Guana Cay were written nearly a decade ago.
It is not a happy ending.
In 2002, Discovery Land Company purchased 459 acres of land on Guana Cay, a sparsely-inhabited islet located in the Bahamas. At a public meeting held three years later, government officials informed shocked and angry residents that the project had already been approved and that the early phases of development were underway. According to Save Guana Cay Reef, three points were made clear by attendees at the meeting: that Crown lands were not to be given away by the government, that an area known as Joe’s Creek was to be left intact “so as not to destroy the fragile environmental ecosystem there,” and that a golf course should not be constructed, due to fears that fertilizers would impact on the coral reef located less than 50 feet off-shore.
After the meeting, the government gave away 105 acres of crown land to DLC, granted permission for the construction of a 240-slip marina at Joe’s Creek, and approved the construction of the golf course.
As development of the Baker’s Bay resort began, residents established Save Guana Cay Reef to help protect the islet’s environment. Around the time of one visit to the United Nations, Troy Albury, the group’s founder, said that “we are absolutely not opposed to development. We just want the developments to be better planned, the impacts monitored, and most importantly environmentally safe for the surrounding reefs.”
Despite contributions from other environmentalist groups, as well as notable figures such as the renowned oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau, Save Guana Cay Reef failed to make much headway in its five-year legal battle against DLC. As a result, the dwindling local community has faced the devastating consequences of the Baker’s Bay development.
In 2012, for example, Save Guana Cay Reef learned that, despite DLC’s promises to construct the golf course to prevent fertilizer from leaching into the ocean, exactly that had happened: Coral reef scientists monitoring Guana Cay had discovered red and green algae “smothering the shoreline,” while 17 cases of coral disease were noted at the north end of the islet, a staggering increase on previous years. Three years later, local media reported that “extensive damage” had been inflicted on the reef system surrounding Guana Cay, including algae growth, nitrogen poisoning, and the loss of “40 percent of the coral cover” in just two years. “There has been environmental desecration out here,” environmental advocate Fred Smith, QC, told The Tribune. “They burned the entire forest, they tore down the mangroves, they dug it all up. They’ve got a golf course and the chemicals are seeping into the reefs that are there.”
For his part, Dr. Livingstone Marshall, Baker Bay’s senior vice-president for environmental and community affairs, insisted that the scientists’ findings were “bogus.” He gave Baker’s Bay a “96 percent or 97 percent grade” for environmental performance and, referencing the photos taken of damage to the reef, said: “It’s just a bunch of pictures.” (When asked why DLC had failed to maintain its commitment to fund the University of Miami’s scrutiny of the environment around Baker’s Bay, Dr. Marshall pointed out that “environmental monitoring is expensive.”)
One of the final news articles written about Guana Cay was published that same year, when locals found, to their horror, that the resort’s operators were preparing for more construction by dredging the ocean at the north end of the island, potentially causing irreparable damage to nearby wetlands; unfortunately, this could not be confirmed, as the same locals had been denied access to Baker’s Bay “for years,” and were even blocked “from using a portion of the publicly owned Queen’s Highway that passes through the property.”
That same article offers a brief glimpse of the world promised to the residents of Guana Cay, as Dr. Albury stresses that commitments made by DLC to “build a community center, reserve the water sports business exclusively for Bahamians, create a beach park, build a solid waste facility for the whole island, and provide housing for police officers” had never been fulfilled. Instead, he said, “we have traffic now, we have crime, we have car accidents. We actually now have a policeman on the island, because we are having problems with people breaking into houses. Before, you knew everybody.”
Today, Discovery Land Company’s website tells potential customers that Baker’s Bay provides its members “the very best of what the Abacos and the greater Bahamas have to offer.” To the rest of us, it stands as testament to the dangers of unfettered development on fragile communities and ecosystems.
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Discovery Land Company believes that Loch Tay will become the latest jewel in the corporate crown, heralding their “regal debut in the British Isles.”
Nothing about our meetings with the people who live in these communities has proven more alarming than the common ground we share. The hallmarks of the DLC strategy never seem to change. Public communication is vague and murky at best, built on outright lies at worst. Land-grab tactics see entire regions bought up, shut down, and siphoned off for the good of the company’s ultra-wealthy members. Construction and operation of the resorts leads to widespread environmental destruction and, in some instances, total annihilation of local ecosystems. Access rights become restricted, residents are harassed, and the company’s ability to take advantage of deficiencies in government planning systems means that nobody ever knows what’s happening before it’s too late.
Here in Scotland, some of us have been accused of “wrecking” DLC’s development at Taymouth Castle. Others have asserted that protest groups are “misinformed and completely unrepresentative of the wishes of local folk.” It has even been suggested that we are driven by “racism and xenophobia.”
Kenmore’s local community council, the sole public body through which DLC regularly communicates, points to the company’s cleaning of the beach area, sponsorship of local events, and ambitions to reopen public facilities as proof of their magnanimity. Most residents’ concerns, the council says, “have already been addressed.”
Every single conversation we have held in recent weeks — with council members, business owners, scientists, campaigners, and residents from around the world — has impressed upon us the need to hold Discovery Land Company’s feet over the fire. These people all say the same thing: DLC’s promises cannot be taken at face value. “Wait and see” approaches to new developments do not work. And the consequences of allowing this company to operate uninhibited, unrestricted, and unscrutinised are always disastrous.
A couple of months ago, the protest group Protect Loch Tay sent DLC a list of asks, commitments, and initiatives, hoping to mark the beginning of a negotiation process that might end in solid, legally-binding agreements made for the good of the loch, the land around it, and the people who live here. DLC issued no response. In fact, the company has made few positive commitments to the long-term health of Loch Tay and the surrounding environs to date; the few that have been made can easily be walked back on. This is our concern — that a failure to exert sufficient pressure on DLC might offer them carte blanche to treat Taymouth Castle, Kenmore, Glen Lyon, and Loch Tay like the “playground” they’re selling to their members.
I dearly hope that the stories of the people of Barbuda, Portugal, Lake Tahoe, Yellowstone, the Pine Barrens, and the Bahamas might shine a brighter light on the way DLC works, the consequences of the company’s actions, and the steps that are necessary to take in order to prevent the desolation of our homes.
Discovery Land Company has planted a thousand red flags along the road to paradise. We would be fools to ignore them.
