Conferences are on the wane these days. CES? Scaled back. Davos? Deferred. Where’s a moneyed professional in need of camaraderie to go? Filippo Brig

Among the Revellers at Ondalinda, Burning Man’s More Exclusive Cousin

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2022-01-22 06:30:03

Conferences are on the wane these days. CES? Scaled back. Davos? Deferred. Where’s a moneyed professional in need of camaraderie to go? Filippo Brignone, a member of the founding family of Costa Careyes, a gated community in the Mexican state of Jalisco, thinks that “the network of Careyes” may be able to serve as a substitute. Every year, Careyes hosts Ondalinda, a five-day festival. The theme of the most recent edition was mycelium, the fuzz of fungal threads through which plants purportedly communicate. “Nature’s Internet,” a pre-festival marketing e-mail called it, linking to a dress-code mood board.

“We get compared to Burning Man, but we didn’t want Ondalinda to be that,” Brignone said, seated in the palapa of his Pacific-front home. He wore flip-flops, a Schaffhausen watch, and several beaded chakra bracelets; his graying hair was slicked back. “We have incredible houses,” he went on. When the festival was new, in 2016, “we were getting calls, like, ‘Can I see a photo of the bathroom?’ ‘Can I see a photo of the toilet?’ Now it’s ‘Please, can I have a house, any house—whatever you have?’ ”

In 1968, Brignone’s father, Gian Franco, an Italian real-estate developer, bought the twenty thousand acres after seeing them from a plane. “It was quite deserted,” Brignone said. “Not good for agriculture.” But perfect for cliff-top villas with screening rooms and infinity pools. Gian Franco, when setting up his community, which he envisioned as “a little Positano,” sold only to buyers who met his twenty-seven criteria. (“24. To have faced serious financial problems. 25. To have a sense of humor.”) Heidi Klum and Seal used to own a house there; Cindy Crawford, Mick Jagger, and Uma Thurman have passed through.