>Behold Cap Cana, the Dominican Republic’s newest — and most obscenely ambitious — luxury real-estate enclave.

The legacy of luxury in the Dominican Republic runs deep. It began in the 1970s, with the island’s first high-end resort, Casa de Campo, the brainchild of the late chairman of Gulf + Western, Charles Bluhdorn. A few decades later came the Punta Cana Resort & Club, a more diminutive getaway by Dominican entrepreneur Frank Rainieri. In all, more than 21 golf courses have been built on the island, including designs by both Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Sr., Pete and P.B. Dye and Jack Nicklaus. Gilligan’s Island it’s not.

But today another team of Dominican investors is betting the house — or, more accurately, several thousand houses — that what previous dealmakers accomplished on a relatively smaller scale, they can accomplish on a far more grandiose one. Headed by Santo Domingo–based moguls the Hazoury family, they have united with Nicklaus’s golf-course design firm to court a small nation of well-heeled property buyers to a small city of luxury called Cap Cana.

Currently comprising a few hundred seaside luxury villas and townhouses, along with the Caribbean’s most modern mega-marina and the first of three signature Nicklaus golf courses, Cap Cana will be developed in stages over the coming decade. Once finished, it should include more than 30,000 acres, three miles of beaches, six golf courses, five hotels, 5,000 homes, a wildlife sanctuary, fishing lodge, equestrian club, a racquet and beach club and a host of spas and restaurants — at a total combined valuation of some $2 billion.

Which is all well and good for the developers of Cap Cana — we generally admire hubris for hubris’s sake — but is buying a home here a smart allocation of your personal venture capital? Ricardo Hazoury, a physician who, along with his father and brothers, launched Cap Cana in 2002, notes that 1,009 residences — villas, luxury apartments and townhouses — are currently under construction, with a projected 2,000 to be completed within the coming two years. So far, the tidal wave of supply has hardly dampened demand. “Our residences initially went for $200,000,” Hazoury says. “Nowadays, it’s difficult for someone to buy a residence in Cap Cana for less than $450,000.”

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