There’s a moment on every walk through Nekupe when the reserve stops feeling like a property and starts feeling like something alive. It’s not the villas or the pool that does it. It’s the path, the one lined with the same flowers that were blooming that morning before a single guest woke up, tended by someone who’s been walking that same ground since before dawn. That’s not an accident. It’s a team.

More Than Maintenance

It’s easy to talk about gardens in the abstract: color, tranquility, the usual language of wellness brochures. But at Nekupe, the gardens aren’t a backdrop. They’re one of the clearest expressions of what this reserve actually is: 1,800 acres of Nicaraguan countryside, shaped by people who know this land by hand, not by landscaping plan.

Our Gardening Team works the grounds daily, not to keep things tidy, but to keep them true. Every path, every bloom, every stretch of green that borders the villas is the result of someone deciding, morning after morning, exactly where nature needs a hand and exactly where it doesn’t. That distinction, knowing when to intervene and when to let the land do what it already does well, is a craft, not a chore.

Rooted in Who’s Tending It

What makes this work different at Nekupe isn’t just the scale of the reserve. It’s who’s doing it. Every member of our staff is Nicaraguan, and 80% come from the local community surrounding the property, meaning the hands shaping these gardens belong to people who grew up on this land, who understand its seasons and its soil in a way no outside crew ever could. This isn’t outsourced hospitality. It’s neighbors caring for their own place, and guests feeling the difference whether they can name it or not.

That local knowledge shows up in small, specific ways: which native plants thrive without irrigation, which corners catch the morning light best, which flowers were already growing here long before Nekupe existed and simply deserved to be kept. The team isn’t imposing a garden onto the reserve. They’re drawing one out of it.

An Environment, Not an Amenity

Guests often describe Nekupe’s grounds as peaceful, but peaceful undersells what’s actually happening. Every garden path is a decision. Every bloom at eye level along a walkway was placed there on purpose, by someone who wanted that exact moment, the exact turn in the path, the exact hour the light hits it, to feel a certain way.

That’s the difference between grounds that are maintained and grounds that are cared for. Nekupe’s Gardening Team doesn’t just keep the property looking beautiful. They carry the reserve’s mission forward one path, one flower bed, one early morning at a time, proof that at Nekupe, hospitality doesn’t start at check-in. It starts in the soil.