A Group Built Over Generations
Tayrona’s story begins with a man and a place. What follows is the long arc of a Group built on securing the source, and the discipline to honour it.
Where Hospitality Meets Cinema
The first half-century begins where two worlds meet, in the warmth of a hotel and the craft of cinema.
The Group begins with a man and a place. In the 1960s, James Ordonez Sr. built a small collection of boutique hotels in Colombia around hospitality, discretion, and a sense of place. What he held to there is what the Group holds to now.
From those first properties the collection grew to more than ten boutique hotels across Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina.
Before there was capital, there was care.
What is rare deserves to be honoured, not exploited.
Tayrona Capital was founded in 1970. The turn toward cinema had come a little earlier. In 1968, a stay by Marlon Brando during the production of the film Burn! in Colombia drew the world of film to the properties’ doors, and a lasting friendship between hospitality and film took hold that would shape everything after it.
Out of that friendship came a model. Rather than charging productions for accommodation, logistics, food, transport, and the full apparatus of a shoot, the Group invested those services in exchange for a share of each film’s future revenues and royalties. It is what we now call the Film Finance Program.
It was the first full expression of the principle Tayrona still holds. Lasting value comes from securing the source, not from extraction at the margin.
In 1995, James Ordonez assumed leadership of the Group and carried the model forward, expanding the portfolio as the film library deepened. Across roughly four decades of investment, that library grew into a substantial body of work, and as global distribution matured it became a source of lasting, recurring value.
Tayrona,
A Country Partner
What began in culture became a capability that nations could put to work.
The scale of the Group’s work in film and hospitality, along with the employment and revenue it generated, drew the attention of governments. Tayrona began to work as a country partner, forming alliances with states across more than twenty countries and reinvesting in the destinations, tourism, hospitality, and cultural projects that leave durable benefit behind.
In time, the Group came to work directly with governments on national development, each undertaking anchored in a clear public purpose.
The New Golden Age
With the model proven, the Group built at scale, then organized a lifetime’s work into a single structure.
The Group deepened its relationships with partners around the world, widening its reach. Sagana, the first Maison Tayrona established, anchored the hospitality portfolio. The mindset shifted. Capital and Maisons were no longer built apart, but as one.
Hospitality remained the core, and alongside it Tayrona began to shape the ideas that would become its houses, defining what a vertically integrated luxury group could be when it secured each step from origin to object.
In 2026, a lifetime’s work was organized into four operating divisions. One idea unites them. The Maisons, where a rare material becomes an object made to last. The Nation Building Initiatives, the work the Group carries out beside its sovereign partners. Tayrona Ventures, the upstream platforms that make the rest possible. And Global Finance & Development, which works as a country partner to governments and institutions.
Capital builds the foundation.
Initiatives build the nation.
Ventures secures the source.
Maisons bring it to the world.
Our Future:
The Best Is Yet to Come
The houses carry the principle outward, and the long arc continues.
The houses now carry the principle outward. Emeralds owned from the mountain. The rarest fibres of the Andes. Single-origin cacao, controlled from plantation to bar. Independent watchmaking in the Swiss tradition. A hospitality philosophy conceived for those who value privacy above all. Each begins with a rare material and the discipline to honour it, and nothing leaves without integrity.
The story continues as it began, rooted in a place and built to outlast the hands that shape it.
“Let us write the future together; the best is yet to come.”
Building Nations. Creating Prosperity. Shaping Generations.