Before we had the slightest idea of developing Basecamp Bali. Before Tanzania reopened its doors, before Sardinia’s beach bar became the place nobody wants to leave, before Rome was even a conversation — there was a parking lot. Not a scenic one. Just 100 metres from the dunes, the North Sea and one of the Netherlands’ most beautiful nature reserves, sat an empty asphalt lot. Most people walked past it and saw nothing worth a second look.

That was 2019. It’s where Basecamp began — and where the question that still drives every project the company builds was asked for the first time:

Would we actually want to spend our own time here?

There was no detailed business plan for IJmuiden. No consultants, no spreadsheets telling them what to build. The asphalt disappeared. The soil was restored.

And then, slowly, the experimenting started: tiny houses, renewable energy, local food production, art, architecture — whatever felt like it belonged in a place people would genuinely want to live in, work from, or simply stay a while.

Not everything worked. Hundreds of fruit trees couldn’t handle the salty sea air. But nature had other plans of its own. Biodiversity crept back in. Deer now wander through at night, treating the resort like their own late-night supermarket. What was once dead asphalt now feels like it has always belonged to the dunes around it.

For the first couple of years, the team thought they were simply building a beautiful place to stay. Then something unplanned happened: companies started holding strategy sessions outdoors instead of in meeting rooms.

Families kept coming back, year after year. Artists asked to exhibit their work. Chefs wanted to host dinners under the sky. People started celebrating birthdays, weddings, milestones — all in a place that had been a parking lot a few years earlier.

None of that was in the original plan. It just happened. And it revealed something the founders hadn’t fully realised yet: people weren’t returning for the accommodation. They were returning because they loved spending time there.

IJmuiden was never meant to be a blueprint. It was meant to be a question, asked out loud, on a piece of forgotten land by the sea. But questions like that tend to travel.

The instinct-over-spreadsheets thinking that shaped IJmuiden shows up again in Sardinia, where a beach bar was built instead of twenty more glamping units — because the team wanted somewhere to watch the sunset themselves. It shows up in Tanzania, where a resort that once relied entirely on tour operators found a new way to reach guests directly. And it’s shaping what comes next.

Basecamp Bali is being built the same way IJmuiden was: starting not with a masterplan, but with a question — in Bali’s case, “How can we regenerate this place?” — and a long-term vision shared with the local community rather than imposed on it. And now Rome is next, the newest chapter in a story that started with parking cars.

Today, Basecamp operates destinations across Europe, Africa and Asia, welcoming more than 100,000 guests a year. But scale was never really the point. Every new destination — Bali, Rome, whatever comes after — still starts exactly the way IJmuiden did: with curiosity, not a formula.

That’s the part of the story IJmuiden gets to hold onto forever. It wasn’t just the first Basecamp. It was proof that the best outdoor destinations aren’t the ones that are built biggest — they’re the ones built with the question that started it all:

Would we actually want to spend our own time here?

The answer, six years and multiple continents later, is still a resounding yes.