A Toronto couple that gave up their busy Bay Street lives to open a hotel in Panama is marking a half decade of the new path they blazed for themselves.
For Ryan Somes and Anthea Stanley, a couple originally from Toronto who packed up their lives (including two children) to blaze a new trail in Santa Catalina, Panama, back in 2019, the past five years haven’t exactly been paradise, but, they tell blogTO, they’d never go back to living the 9-to-5 lifestyle they did in Toronto.
Both working in financial jobs in Toronto, Ryan and Anthea told blogTO in an earlier interview that their lives “felt like Groundhog Day,” which in 2013 served as the catalyst for them to purchase a property in Santa Catalina.
Six years later, they packed themselves and their two children — one three months old and one three years old — and moved there full-time to begin building Catalina’s Hideaway, a beachfront eco-conscious boutique hotel.
Five years later, Anthea tells blogTO that Ryan’s never felt the urge to return back to their old way of living in Toronto.
“He loves the new beach lifestyle and different pace of life,” she says. “You can get up and surf then get your work done or work a bit then go fishing then hang with the kids. It’s much more free and less regimented.”
For Anthea, though, the answer is “more complicated.”
While she would “never return to Toronto or her old work [and] lifestyle there,” the challenges they’ve encountered, alongside the labours of running the business have, admittedly, given her pause at times.
“She has to remind herself of her now flexible lifestyle, and how much time she has to be a mom here, which she loves and would never have had in Canada,” Ryan tells blogTO.
Of the “many many” challenges the couple have faces over the past five years, Ryan and Anthea say that one of their most major near-breaking points was in 2023, when massive protests broke out in Panama just near the start of peak season, shutting the hotel down for 6 weeks.
“These were peaceful, environmental activists standing up for conservation of Panama’s resources, which we fully supported, but was painful for the business,” they tell blogTO.
Nevertheless, Catalina’s Hideaway (not to mention Ryan and Anthea’s resolve) persisted, expanding the hotel and keeping the business rolling.
The view from the newest casita.
Most recently, the couple has added a new luxury treehouse and a beachfront casita, which features an outdoor soaker tub and garden shower (“having a bath under the stars isn’t something you can do everywhere in the world,”) to the property, which Ryan says was “all Anthea.”
Their next project is to implement an adjacent expansion of private residences on the property.
“These will be owned by investors that will build vacation homes with kitchens and multiple bedrooms, but be branded by us and managed entirely by our team,” Anthea tells blogTO.
“[It’s] the perfect opportunity for people looking to have a vacation home, receive rental income and take advantage of the accelerating property values in our growing little jungle town.”
Aside from growing the hotel, Ryan and Anthea’s kids have also grown over the years, and have done so utterly immersed in nature.
“Growing up in nature and a warm climate where they can be outside all the time has been incredible for our kids,” Anthea tells blogTO.
A sweeping overview of the property.
Now five and eight, their children can regularly be found jumping on trampolines, in the pool, ziplining, dirt biking, and fishing around the property, as well as learning about the animal and plant life living all around them.
“They watch turtles hatch, we have an anteater that lives in our yard, waterfall hikes, fishing, sunset surf sessions,” Anthea tells blogTO. “We don’t have a family dining table inside and have all of our family meals outside.”
The kids have also begun to attend a local school that has an environmental focus, leading them on beach clean-ups and jungle walks, as well as teaching them planting and cultivating skills.
Much like raising a family, running a business has its own rewards, too, the largest of which, Anthea tells blogTO, is the response they’ve gotten from visitors to the hotel.
“Sitting and having a morning smoothie after yoga or an evening cocktail with a guest and hearing them rave about their stay can literally make us feel electric,” she says.
“Families are creating core memories during their stays with us as their kids are learning to surf, or returning from snorkel adventures with real large wildlife,” she adds. “It’s indescribable the feeling we get when we see this in real-time.”
The hotel’s pool.
Having returned to Toronto just three times in the past five years (“It would have been more but the pandemic had us stuck here our first couple of years,”) there’s plenty about the city that strikes Ryan and Anthea each time they visit.
“To be honest, we found Toronto to be a lot more expensive than it used to be,” Anthea tells blogTO. “But we are also business owners and know that costs have gone wild for business owners.”
They’ve also noticed that, as the slower pace of life back home in Santa Catalina becomes increasingly status quo to them, Toronto’s hustle and bustle has, subsequently, become less tolerable.
“We went out with our old colleagues on the same day to different places on Bay Street and both messaged each other saying we felt anxious being there, like we had déjà vu seeing everyone walking the same direction, racing to the train, or to a meeting in the PATH,” Anthea tells blogTO.
“It definitely reminded us both of why we left.”
In spite of that, the modern comforts of Toronto, like proximity to great food (“and Uber Eats,” adds Anthea,) 24-hour electricity and properly maintained roads, still hold plenty of appeal for Ryan and Anthea, as does the pull of family and friends.