Drawing on journalistic investigations of multiple biotech initiatives on the island, with particular attention to the Vitalia project—a privately governed enclave dedicated to life-extension technologies and so-called “longevity science”—the talk shows how, within capitalist-libertarian imaginaries of tax havens and deregulated innovation hubs, Roatán is framed as a “tropical haven” for biotech elites. At the same time, local populations experience land dispossession, environmental strain, and systematic exclusion from decision-making processes and spatial formation, as governance and citizenship are spatialised through enclaves, exceptionality, and privatisation.

Situating Roatán within broader debates and ideologies on health, technology, and urbanisation, the central argument revolves around how health is profoundly distorted: separated from everyday well-being, care, and public accountability, and redirected toward speculative futures of enhancement for a privileged few—confined within a small enclave imagined for an ‘Übermensch.’ In this context, both health and citizenship are reconstituted through venture capital logics and biotechnological ideologies.

I argue that Roatán thus functions as an anti-urban laboratory: a process of de-urbanisation in which experimental health regimes rely on spatial enclosure, regulatory exceptionalism, and the deliberate disembedding of health from existing urban and social entanglements, while bypassing care infrastructure.