Some stories are measured in buildings; others are measured in generations. The story of Grupo Colonias is the second kind. It began in 1984, when a young engineer named Henry Faarup Mauad decided that Panama could be a better place to live, and it has kept being written four decades later as his son, Henry Faarup Humbert, builds an entire city. Between the two of them lie more than a thousand homes, a particular way of understanding the craft, and a single conviction: that to build is, at its core, to shape how people live.
Ing. Henry Faarup Mauad
Henry Faarup Mauad, P.E., is the founder of Grupo Colonias and a pioneer of urban development in Panama. A Civil Engineer trained at the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (completed in French), he began his career at ASSA in 1975, in engineering and finance. An entrepreneur by nature —something he traces back to a childhood spent working in his family's stores— he soon founded Tridex (insurance adjusters) and Asetecnia (appraisals and inspections), and in 1984 made the leap that would define his life: Colonias de Panamá. He built some of the country's first gated communities and was a founding partner of Costa del Este, one of the most ambitious megaprojects of his generation.
His passion for real estate, he says, was born of two sources: his profession as an engineer and his travels abroad, from which he returned with ideas to improve the quality of life of Panamanians. From 2009 to 2014 he served as Panama's Ambassador to France, with concurrent missions to UNESCO and Switzerland. He came home thinking he would retire and play golf; what he found instead was a conversation with his son that would pull him back into the arena. A man of mantras —“in life, you never hang up the gloves”— he today serves as Secretary of the David–Panama Railway project, having never stopped working side by side with the next generation.
I came back thinking I would retire and play golf. And I found my son, full of energy, and we would talk about new ideas. What better thing for a father than to have your children follow in your path.
Henry Faarup Humbert
Henry Faarup Humbert is CEO of Grupo Colonias and co-founder of Ciudad Porta Norte. An economist from the University of Texas at Austin (2012), he brings to the family business a perspective shaped by Panamanian venture capital and by the school of value investing —Buffett, Munger, Naval— from which he draws one guiding idea: compound interest applied not only to capital, but to cities. He calls it “patient urban capital”: the conviction that the best communities, like the best investments, are built on a horizon of decades, not quarters.
Entrepreneurship, he says, runs in his blood: a great-grandson of Federico Humbert Victoria —one of the developers of El Cangrejo— and of Juan B. Arias, founder of Banco General, he worked every summer from the age of twelve to learn something new. In 2014 he stepped in as CEO of the company and, together with his father and the Rojas Pardini family, brought Porta Norte to life. A devotee of “Solarpunk” urbanism and walkable cities, his personal mission is one he states plainly: to create vibrant, progressive, active communities. “My mission is to follow my true interest,” he says, “which is to create vibrant communities.”
The handover that changed the scale
For nearly three decades, Colonias de Panamá meant building homes with judgment: pioneering gated communities like Bosque de La Cibeles and Fuente del Fresno —the latter awarded by SPIA in 1998— and towers that shaped the skyline of Bella Vista and San Francisco. More than a thousand homes, one by one, house by house. But the story turned a corner in 2014. Henry Faarup Mauad was returning from France with retirement in mind; his son Henry Faarup Humbert was coming back full of energy and new ideas. “After many arguments and exchanges of opinion, he convinced me,” the father recalls. From that reunion came a generational handover and, with it, a new identity: Colonias de Panamá became Grupo Colonias.
The new name was also a new ambition. The company stopped building project by project and embraced the Master Developer model: no longer constructing houses within a city, but creating the entire city and its code of living. That shift has a name —Ciudad Porta Norte— and a clear philosophy: from the wall of the gated community to the open, walkable street of New Urbanism. The same family, the same craft, an entirely new scale. Father and son set out to find a lot for a single building; they came back with the plans for a 260-hectare city.
Four decades, milestone by milestone
The story is still being written
From a 66-home community to a walkable city of 260 hectares. We invite you to discover what we are building today.