Roxanne Downer – My Articles

Property for Sale, Four Ecosystems: Forget a private island. What you need is a place like this.

It’s a rare country that can lay claim to more than 650 varieties of birds, a breed of nearly endangered wolves and its own subspecies of jaguar. So what would you say about a single address that can? Located on the edge of the Pantanal wetlands in central Brazil, Fazenda Santo Antonio do Paraiso is a 400-square-mile ranch that encompasses four distinct ecosystems, along with two rivers — the Piquiri and the Itiquira — that surround the property like a moat. With six landing strips on-site, it’s also remarkably accessible. And it could all be yours for $50 million.

When General Marinho Lutz founded the ranch in 1943, he landed the first cattle in a couple of DC-3s amid a veritable Eden. He eventually built a 300-acre town, complete with a main estate (with 11 bedrooms — one for each of his wives), sawmill, tannery, chapel and farm fields, but left the other 255,000 acres for Mother Nature. On the market for the first time in its history, Fazenda Santo Antonio even comes with 30 of its own indigenous cowboys. But it’s not the agriculture or the architecture that boggles the mind in this mother of all second homes.

Park your King Air at the hangar, settle into the main estate’s veranda (shaded by 100-foot mango trees) and gaze out on a pristine domain teeming with puma, jaguar, deer, wolves, otter and crocodiles. Try doing that in the Hamptons.