One day we bought a piece of land in Cyprus simply because it was beautiful.

There was no plan, no strategy and certainly no business model. We wanted a table, a bench and a place to spend time. That was all.

Then came another piece of land. Then another. And another.

My name is Sergey. This is Manana.

We are not newcomers to anything. Not to business, not to travel, not to the kind of life where you wake up in a different country and the hotel knows your name before you arrive. We have done all of that for a long time.

But wherever life took us, we kept ending up in the same kinds of places.

Not landmarks. Not shopping streets. Not famous attractions.

For reasons we did not fully understand at the time, we were always drawn to old trees, rivers, abandoned terraces, gardens, valleys and places that were impossible to stop looking at.

Cyprus, it turned out, has more of these than almost anywhere.

People have lived on this island for over ten thousand years. And when you spend enough time here — really enough time — you begin to discover things that most people never see. Ancient mills hidden along rivers. Stone terraces carved into hillsides by hand. Forgotten footpaths through valleys that have no names on modern maps.

We have been here long enough to know where to look.

Sometimes we sit beside an old mill that stands on one of our properties and wonder about the people who sat there before us. Perhaps five hundred years ago. Perhaps two thousand. Drinking wine. Talking about business. Making plans. Speaking about travel. Imagining the future.

More or less the same conversation.

Most people do not own a yacht because they sail every day. They own it because of what it represents. A beautiful piece of land is exactly the same thing. Except it grows. It changes. It becomes richer with time. And unlike most possessions, it has a habit of outliving its owners.

Somewhere along the way we realised what we had actually been doing all these years.

We were not collecting countries.

We were not collecting hotels.

We were not collecting watches.

We were collecting places.

Over time, Nomad Garden became more than a collection.

It became a way of looking at the world.

A belief that beautiful places deserve to be found, protected, improved and eventually passed on. A belief that the true value of a place is not measured only by the land itself, but also by the people, stories, traditions and memories that grow around it.

Today that collection is called Nomad Garden.

We did not become farmers. We did not become environmental activists. And we certainly did not give up travel, comfort or the other pleasures of life.

Something else simply found its way into our lives.

Beautiful places worth owning.

And after all these years, we seem to have become rather good at finding them.

We called it Nomad Garden because that is what we are.

The world is full of beautiful places to visit.

Very few are worth owning.

But judge for yourself.