Casa Oro Group

What’s in it

Five houses: Casa Oro, Nuestra Casa, El Pacífico, Casa Andalucía and Casa Ruth, from a backpacker hostel to a hillside retreat, room for roughly 150 guests at once, all walkable in town. Three places to eat: Café Oro, Hijo de Pita and the restaurant at El Pacífico. Surf lessons and rentals, shuttles to the beaches and the airport, the sea turtle tour, and the Oro chocolate factory tour on Saturdays. An artist residency and a volunteer program. Rancho Regeneración, the farm. And Oro Chocolate, which was born inside it.

It runs as Casa Oro Internacional S.A., with more than 50 local employees, all of it in Spanish.

An ecosystem, on purpose

When I pitched the first purchase I made only the financial case. The case I didn’t make was the one I actually believed: design inspired by nature, businesses as ecosystems, each one feeding the next. The more people eat our food or take our shuttles to the beach, the more our place gets known and the more people come to stay with us. Then the more trees we can plant, and the more demand that creates for the kind of farming we do. Then someone else says, those guys are making money doing that, maybe we should too.

It worked well enough that my partners said, this is good, let’s do more of this. We reinvested what we made into the next property, and the next. Between 2016 and 2017 we added Nuestra Casa, Casa Andalucía, El Pacífico and Casa Ruth, and I designed and rebuilt every one. At our peak I had about 60 people working full time and 40 more on the construction crew, and at our peak, as I told the Chicago Reader, the houses averaged about 90 percent occupancy.

A more dignified place to work

As founder and CEO I owned the vision, the strategy, the execution and the results, down to the details. I learned fast that the biggest lever is the people. Everything is a people problem.

So I studied how workplaces in Nicaragua usually run and designed a more dignified one: people in every position are respected, everyone’s opinion counts, and yes, everyone hugs. I started hugging everyone, and the town started calling me Don Muffa. I asked them not to, so they called me jefe. We built a flat structure, systems for the routine work, and values the team actually uses. Over time I designed myself out of the day-to-day.

From paper to numbers we trust

When I arrived, the business ran on paper. I moved operations to electronic systems with paper controls, which gave us real reporting and metrics, made the numbers transparent, and let us make strategic decisions on facts. Every team member is cross-trained and expected to take initiative. That’s how we kept operating, and kept taking care of the team, through the pandemic.

In October 2026 we launched a new casaorogroup.com.

The best part

My favorite part is watching someone on the team courageously do something they never thought they could. Karina learned to make chocolate with me, batch by batch; now she leads the factory tour. Local crews built what I drew, and a team I trained learned to run it without me. That’s the proof.