First crowdfunded private island causes storm over ‘colonial’ claim to be a micronation
The Principality of Islandia, a self-declared nation two thirds the size of a football pitch, has become a lesson in the challenges of trying to start your own tiny country
An investor in the Principality of Islandia relaxes with a paper on the low-lying island of the coast of Belize that was purchased via crowd-funding (Photo: Letsbuyanisland.com)
A group of investors who crowd-funded the purchase of a tropical island in Belize are facing controversy after declaring their slice of the Caribbean country a new micronation.
The dream of the first-ever crowdfunded private island, achieved in 2019 with the purchase of Coffee Caye off the coast of Belize City for $180,000 (£140,000), soon turned sour after the group renamed their 1.2-acre property the Principality of Islandia.
Declaring their sliver of mangroves, palm trees and sand to be the world’s newest micronation, the new owners quickly issued passports, crowned a co-founder as “prince” and designed their own flag, passport stamp and national anthem.
However, the reimagined Principality of Islandia, which is run as a business by two Britons and an American, has hit a nerve among many Belizians, underlining the challenges of trying to start your own tiny country.
As news of the self-declared nation spread around the former British colony in mid-March, Belize’s Prime Minister, John Briceño, condemned “stupid” investors who had already begun making day trips and camping overnight on the island.
Asked by a local reporter about the island, Mr Briceño replied: “We will never allow anybody to have their own country within this country… If you’re stupid enough to pay a lot of money to buy piece of land, good for you.”
Despite the controversy, the Principality of Islandia will be sticking to its self-described ‘marketing ploy’ as the world’s newest micronation (Photo: Letsbuyanisland.com)
Former investment banker Marshall Mayer, who co-founded the crowdfunding project and website Letsbuyanisland.com in 2018, says he was not offended by the PM’s remarks, and puts the local media attention down to a “misunderstanding” over marketing tactics.
“I look at it as a branding and marketing effort. People see flag, anthem and coat of arms and I see a banner, theme song and a logo,” he told i.
The journey to purchasing Coffee Caye, an island two thirds the size of a football pitch, began in 2018 when Mayer, 31, and co-founder Gareth Johnson came up with the idea of crowd-funding the purchase of a private island somewhere in the world.
Mayer, who lives in New York City, says the group eventually settled on Coffee Caye after exploring locations everywhere from the Philippines to Canada and Ireland. He says that Belize won out partly due to the former British colony’s clear ownership rights based on English common law.
A company was set up to handle shareholder investments and a decision made to proceed with purchasing an island as soon as the threshold of 50 investors, each contributing around $3,000, was reached.
It took almost a year of haggling with the owners of Coffee Caye before the group were able to complete on the sale in December 2019.
Inspired by other unrecognised microstates such as the Principality of Seborga, a small Italian village in northern Italy, the new owners decided to declare their island a micronation.
Mayer, who says he has travelled extensively around the world explained his fascination with the concept: “One of my favourite [micronations] is in Nevada where this guy built a huge naval monument in the middle of the desert to a navy that has never existed.
“There’s Christiania in Copenhagen, which is a big tourist destination, as well as Užupis in Vilnius, and Sealand right off your coast. There are a handful in New Zealand. They really are all over the place.”
Early visitors to the crowd-funded island have enjoyed fishing in the tropical waters (Photo: Letsbuyanisland.com)
Letsbuyanisland.com co-founder Gareth Johnson also has experience in quirky holiday destinations and off the beaten track travel. The British entrepreneur, who currently lives as a digital nomad, is the co-founder of Young Pioneer Tours, a tour operator that specialises in travel to post Soviet states and other “destinations your mother would rather you stay away from”. Johnson’s firm is not without its controversies. It was criticised in 2017 for the death of Otto Warmbier at the hands of his North Korean jailers, after the American tourist was arrested on a guided tour in 2015 and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment with hard labour.
Young Pioneer Tours has already taken a group of paying tourists to visit the Coffee Caye, named for its vague coffee-bean shape, with every visitor receiving an Islandian immigration stamp in their passport.
Mayer insists that early investors were “not just looking for another place to tick off the list but a unique property that they can be a part of.” But the project has clearly caught the imagination of travel-mad investors who may feel they have visited everywhere else worth seeing and now want to own a slice of, or at least visit, the world’s newest country.
Mayer stresses that talk of a micronation is “tongue-in-cheek” and “squarely within the laws of Belize”.
However, with a blog post on the island’s website including a reference to having successfully “colonized” their small slice of Belize, the group’s nation-building fantasies can come off tone-deaf in a country where conflict over local land rights and colonialism is a lived experience for many.
Britain’s last foothold on the American continents, Belize did not gain independence until 1981. And its post-colonial history has been characterised by land conflict, both internally between the state and Mayan communities over rights to oil exploration on indigenous land and with neighbouring Honduras and Guatemala over the boundaries of the state itself.
Tensions over native lands forced the cancellation of the first stop on Prince William and Kate’s charm offensive around the Caribbean last week. Opposition to the royal outing arose from a dispute between residents of the Toledo district and Flora and Fauna International, a charity that William is a patron of.
While investors took a poll to decide on purchasing the island, the “nation” of Islandia is no democracy, and is run the same as any other company. Mayer, and fellow board members Gareth Johnson and Jodie Hill (she is also the island’s Prime Minister) are free to make decisions on the future of Islandia without the input of investors. Mayer says they are working to get shareholders involved in the more “fun aspect of the decision making”.
Future plans for the island involve turning it into a tourist destination and profitable business, with four to six bedrooms and a small investor home on the back of the island that its 150 fractional owners can visit for free in a similar way to a timeshare.
Mayer is bullish about the criticism he has received for his project online, telling i: “There are always going to be trolls.”
“We’ve seen ‘coloniser’, someone made a comment about white men doing white men things.
“We have investors of every age, male and female, across 30 plus countries. I would like to think it’s an incredibly diverse group of people that club together for this project.”
Recent publicity around the project has helped the company reach its crowdfunding goals, with investments for Coffee Caye closed out at 150 and a waiting list of over 100 interested buyers looking to join in whatever project comes next. There is already talk of purchasing another island elsewhere.
Despite the controversy, the Principality of Islandia will be sticking to its self-described “marketing ploy” as the world’s newest micronation.
But Mayer has insisted that he would never dream of formally separating from any country, “especially one that is as kind to host us as Belize has been”.
Micronations of the world
While Islandia may be the first micronation to spring up as a marketing stunt for a crowd-funding scheme, the concept of declaring statehood is something that caught the public imagination long ago.
In Passport to Pimlico, the classic 1949 comedy, the unearthing of treasure and documents leads to a small part of London’s Westminster being declared legally part of the House of Burgundy, and therefore exempt from the mundanity of post-war rationing or other bureaucratic restrictions.
Life imitated fiction when the Republic of Frestonia attempted to secede from London, and the rest of the UK in 1977. Squatters on Freston Road, Notting Hill claimed the entire street as independent, before gradually evolving into a housing co-op.
Other micronations have been created with a distinct moral or legal cause in mind.
In 1949, Celestia claimed the whole of the universe – except for the Earth – as its territory with the aim of stopping warring nation-states from seizing any part of outer space. Founder James Mangan immediately notified the US, Soviet Union, UK and UN that Celestia had banned all further atmospheric nuclear tests and later sent angry letters of protest to the leaders of the US and Soviet Union on the occasion of their first space flights. The country applied for a seat at the UN, an application that is still pending, and managed to get its flag flown in front of the building on 6 June, 1958.
An aerial image shows the Principality of Sealand, some seven miles off the coast of Suffolk (Photo: Getty)
The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands claimed the territory of Australia’s uninhabited Coral Sea Islands in 2004 in response to the Australian government’s failure to recognise same-sex marriage, before dissolving in 2017 when same-sex unions were legalised.
There is also a subset of micronations with arguably more legitimate, if unrecognised claims to ownership.
For example, the principality of Sealand claims its legitimacy from the fact that at the time of its founding it was in international waters. It claims HM Fort Roughs, an offshore fort in the North Sea approximately 7.5 miles off the coast of Suffolk, as its territory. An unrecognised independent sovereign state since 1967, the World War II anti-aircraft platform was outside of British territorial waters until they were extended in 1987. It is governed by the Bates family, hereditary royal rulers who even survived a coup plot by a small group of German and Dutch mercenaries in 1978.
The Principality of Seborga, a village in the Italian Riviera, claims its right to statehood from the fact that no historical record of the sale of the village to Italy from the year 1729 can be found. The village, which has an elected queen, claims this means they are not a part of Italy at all. It has many of the trappings of a state, including passports, currency that can be spent in shops and even mock border posts.
