Pachacamac was a divinity worshipped in various regions across Tahuantinsuyo Empire. Its main temple and oracle were located on the coastal band north of the Lurin River mouth, on the Pacific Coast. Chroniclers narrate Pachacamac shared in the task of organizing the world together with Wiracocha. He lived underground and was responsible for earthquakes and food. Some myths describe this divinity as the husband of Pachamama, the Mother Earth and Goddess of Heavens.

Pachacamac sanctuary was the most important oracle in pre-Hispanic Peru. It was regarded as one of the most important ancient sacred sites in the entire American continent, and has been classified by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site.

It is a historical center of enormous importance and size. Just 31 kilometers south of Lima, it spans 492 hectares and bears clear testimony to an extraordinary civilization.

Like many other people, I never understood why, being so close to Lima, this religious site, so appropriate for meditation, had never deserved the attention it merited from the local authorities. Pachacamac seemed abandoned and forgotten, although its magnetism could certainly attract future generations.

Dolphins are a very peculiar species. They are in fact a model community that has survived more than 15 million years, because its members do not kill each other. Dolphins feed and help each other without degrading their life system or their environment. They have never caused any threats that might impair their peaceful way of living.

With these thoughts in mind, in 1986 I bought a property to build a house where I could live in contact with the dolphins. When my brother saw the blueprints of this house project and understood the concept, he made me think about the possibility of sharing it and proposing it as a collective, not just a personal, experience. A personal project became a collective endeavor. From home, it became a hotel. At that time, because of my work, I shared my life between Lima and Washington. There, in 1988, I retained the services of an architect and we started to work on the conceptual design.

At the beginning of our efforts, he told me something that would become very significant later: “when I finish with your commission, I will show you some blueprints I drafted four years ago.” When he delivered the plans for my hotel, he also sent me the blueprints of his intriguing project. Five years earlier, in 1983, the American university that was the first to admit black students and encourage co-education, among other pioneering initiatives, hired him to design the “university of the future”. He designed a university for a thousand dolphin students, proposing that students in the future would emulate dolphins. The name of this project said it all: “A Utopian Past and a Visionary Future: Oberlin 2133.”

Surprisingly, I had studied at Oberlin College, from 1971 to 1974, where I earned a degree in Economics. In 1988, I also proposed dolphins would tell us how to perpetuate ourselves as a species. From two different inception points, we had converged towards a single meeting point: his was a university campus project; mine, a hotel. Both converged in wanting to create appropriate conditions for learning for a group of people.

This may be called a chance meeting, a mere coincidence. However, I don’t believe in coincidence. In fact, I believe this convergence was an alignment. Things don’t happen in vain. Two people connected to Oberlin College who had never had any prior relation in their entire lives shared a common vision of the future.

That’s how Los Delfines Hotel was born, as a distinct, unique and environmentally driven proposal where common service areas would share a visual registry with the dolphins’ habitat. The concept sought to encourage communication between two intelligent species. While dolphins, a species of marine mammals, had adapted to the environment, we, humans, insisted on adapting everything to us, to the extent we de-nature ourselves and jeopardize the survival not only of our own species, but of all other living beings on our planet.

It has been a year already since our two dolphins, Yaku and Wayra, live in an aquarium in our Chorrillos property, as if in advance to what we have proposed for the entire 200 hectares.

A NEW GREEN WORLD is a social concept evolving around dolphins and guided by a series of precepts that will govern this community’s coexistence.