Calgary Herald: Tranquillity awaits at Spirit Bay

Spirit Bay is more than a community, it’s a feeling.

Picture, if you will, a quaint fishing village of colourful homes nestled in a bay where ocean waves spill onto the shoreline and with boats bobbing in the nearby marina.

That’s the tranquil visual David Butterfield offers with his plans for this $500-million village development wrapping around Becher Bay in Metchosin some 35 minutes from Victoria, B.C.

“It’s the greatest little village on the North American continent. We’re creating the perfect little village,” he says “Why? Because we have a partner whose environmental development vision has lined up perfectly with ours and have a wonderful piece of property to work with.”

And that’s from a guy who has been creating environmentally sensitive communities for three decades in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. 

Butterfield’s company, The Trust for Sustainable Development, has partnered up with the Scia’new First Nations Band to carefully whittle Spirit Bay from 404 wooded hectares of band property and along 12 kilometres of south-facing shoreline.

Water is the focal point of this redevelopment of a 200-year-old native fishing village from both scenic and technological focal points.

Wallace J. Nichols, a U.S. marine biologist, says we all have a “blue mind” — “a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment” — that’s triggered when we’re in or near water.

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