Belize Lodge and Excursions - Our History

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Ken Karas, founder and owner of BLE, was a wildlife film maker and photographer who traveled extensively around the world when he found the property that is now the Boden Creek Ecological Preserve in the late 1990s.

Ken is passionate about wildlife and preserving its habitat. He spent a great deal of time in Africa and is very familiar with the safari circuit there. He was in Belize for many months working on a project when he formed the idea of saving this property that was scheduled to be clear cut.

Because the area is beautiful, remote, untouched and surrounded by parks and reserves on three sides, it fit the successful African safari model. Using his knowledge of this model, a circuit of lodges on private preserves, Ken has dreamed up Belize Lodge and its trans-habitat tour of lodges.

With Belize’s stability and proximity to the US, ecotourism is a viable and sustainable use of the region’s lands. Ultimately Ken plans on building up to 12 lodges in different habitats.

Belize Lodge and Excursions History

The 13,600 acres of critical habitat on Golden Stream in southern Belize had been slated for logging and commercial agricultural development until its purchase in 1998 by Belize Lodge and Excursions.

The Toledo district in southern Belize has vast areas of undisturbed habitat, high concentration of protected areas, low population density, and a rich cultural history. This makes the region a great place for ecotourism.

In addition to acquiring the 13,600 acres that makes up the Boden Creek Ecological Preserve, BLE helped set up and partly finance the non-profit land conservation trust -the Golden Stream Corridor Preserve (GSCP) – which acquired 15,150 acres along the other side of Golden Stream.

Together, these two properties (BLE and GSCP parcels) anchor a 12-mile habitat corridor that protects the last remaining tropical forests connecting the mountains to the coast in Belize. This corridor represents a critical area of biodiversity that forms the south-eastern part of the greater Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC).

The MBC is one of the world’s largest conservation initiatives focusing on countries in Central America from Mexico to Panama. The isthmus of Central America covers only 0.5% of the world’s land area yet contains 5% of all known biodiversity.

BLE’s intervention not only saved these lands from timber extraction, conversion to citrus plantations and shrimp farming, but also safeguards the core area of the Port Honduras Marine Reserve (PHMR) into which the Golden Stream flows.

In August of 2001 another large parcel (12,000 acres) of land within the Golden Stream watershed came under protection through a Debt-for-Nature Swap with the United States and the Government of Belize. The US will forgive debts of Belize in exchange for setting aside government lands and putting them under protected status.

It completes the corridor link along the eastern bank of the Golden Stream to the coast and comprises over seven miles of coastal mangrove habitat in the Port Honduras Marine Reserve.