Founder

Marat Omarov is the founder of The ARK, a regenerative village on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. He built it in his forties, and it is the culmination of everything that came before: a career spent building things at scale, and a long search for something that was, finally, entirely his own to build.

Upbringing

He was born in Kazakhstan in 1983. At fourteen his father sent him to a military boarding school for boys in Almaty, a place of rigid hierarchy that felt to him like a cage. He saw it through and graduated, and from there was sent on to the Military University of the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, one of the foremost military schools of the former Soviet world, where he trained as a military interpreter. That was not his choice either. In his third year, he climbed out of a dormitory window one night and never went back. It was the first decision he had made entirely for himself, and the start of a life he would choose rather than inherit.

Professional life

The discipline stayed with him, and he put it to work early. At twenty-three he founded The Vienna Ball in Almaty, later renaming it The Opera Ball, and ran it for close to a decade. It grew into an international event whose prize was juried by the music directors of leading opera houses, among them the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera.

At twenty-eight he was appointed advisor for innovation and business development to the mayor of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city.

At thirty-three he led EXPO 2017 Astana, the three-month world's fair hosted by Kazakhstan. He was responsible for the construction and fit-out of every thematic pavilion and for the full program: more than 3,000 events across 93 days, including the opening and closing ceremonies, a custom Cirque du Soleil production, and concerts by world-renowned performers. For that work he received the Medal for Outstanding Labor from the President of Kazakhstan.

Transition

By every outward measure he had succeeded, and none of it reached the part of him that mattered most. In late 2017 he walked away, having gone as far as that life could take him, though he has never disowned it. What those years taught him is in everything he has built since.

A trip to Mexico became the turning point. Over several years in Tulum, the identity he had spent decades building came apart, and he began to experience himself as part of the living world rather than apart from it. Then he watched that place be consumed by extractive tourism, jungle cleared by the acre for developments that called themselves "eco." It left him with a question he could not set down: what kind of world was he willing to raise children in.

The ARK

The ARK became his answer. In 2021 he found the land, a 200-acre former cattle ranch in Santa Teresa stripped bare by sixty years of grazing, down to a handful of plant species and dead soil.

He chose Costa Rica deliberately: a country with no army, powered almost entirely by renewable energy, and stable in an unstable world. He made one promise that has governed every decision since: not to cut down a single tree. He funded the entire project himself rather than take on investors who might steer it, and he built it alongside the local family that had worked the land for generations, giving them a share of everything The ARK creates so they would remain and belong.

The early years nearly broke him, with no sales, real financial fear, and every reason to stop, but he kept going, believing that authenticity and purposeful living are rewarded in the end.

Today the land supports more than 400 species of useful plants, the wildlife has returned, and The ARK has grown into a functioning village and an ecosystem of businesses: a farm, a center for conscious learning, a recording studio, hospitality, and a community that reaches around the world.

What he is building is meant to reach beyond one place. The ARK is created as a demonstration that people can live differently, with land, work, community, and shared prosperity held together as one system, and as evidence that this can become ordinary rather than exceptional.

He is increasingly asked to speak on what he has learned: about regeneration, about building community, and about the cost and the reward of leaving a settled life to build a truer one.

His work now is to keep The ARK honest, and to help others build their own.