Gran Paradiso: A Tuscan-Inspired Community with a True Florida Story

By Scott Swonger

Drive south out of Venice on Tamiami Trail and, about three miles down the road, you'll pass an entrance that's hard to miss: grand columns, fountains, and lush landscaping announcing Gran Paradiso. The name means "great paradise" in Italian, and the community leans into it, with Tuscan-inspired architecture, tiled roofs, and winding streets named after Italian towns and regions. But behind the Old World styling is a story that's pure Southwest Florida — one of cattle ranches, boom-and-bust real estate cycles, and one of the fastest-growing master-planned developments in the country.

From Ranchland to Rooftops

Long before there were pickleball courts and resort pools, this land was open ranch country. For roughly seventy years, the ground beneath what is now Wellen Park was working agricultural land, first known as Berry Ranch and later Taylor Ranch, where families grew citrus, watermelon, sod, and hay and ran cattle across thousands of acres.

The transformation began around the turn of the millennium. The Taylor family sold the property to Georgia developer Stan Thomas, who assembled the 26-square-mile ranch in a series of purchases ending in 2002, briefly making him the largest private landowner in Sarasota County. That same year, roughly 8,000 acres were annexed into the City of North Port at the landowners' request — a decision that still sparks debate among residents today. In 2004, the Florida Legislature created the West Villages Improvement District, a special taxing authority modeled after the Reedy Creek district that served Disney World, charged with building roads, stormwater systems, and other infrastructure for the massive development to come.

A Rough Start and a Rescue

Gran Paradiso itself broke ground with big ambitions and unfortunate timing. Around 2006, local builders Sam Rodgers and Lee Wetherington began developing the roughly 1,000-acre parcel as a luxury neighborhood. Then the Great Recession hit. Like so many Florida projects of that era, Gran Paradiso stalled, and the development sat in distress for years.

The turnaround came in 2013, when national homebuilder Lennar acquired the community and restarted construction in earnest. Lennar built out the vast majority of Gran Paradiso's homes, which ultimately grew to nearly 2,000 residences spanning townhomes, coach homes, twin villas, and single-family homes ranging from manor and executive styles up to estate homes, many overlooking the community's lakes and preserves.

The timing of the revival was fortunate. In 2014, Mattamy Homes and Vanguard Land purchased the remaining 9,600 acres of the old ranch for tens of millions of dollars — one of the largest residential land deals in the nation at the time — and branded the broader area as the West Villages. Gran Paradiso became one of its flagship neighborhoods, alongside Island Walk, Renaissance, and others, as the area climbed the rankings of America's fastest-selling master-planned communities.

West Villages Becomes Wellen Park

If you've heard Gran Paradiso described as being in "West Villages" and "Wellen Park," you've heard both correctly. In April 2020, the master developer rebranded the entire area as Wellen Park — a name derived from the German word for waves and the Dutch word for wellness. Part of the motivation was practical (the West Villages name couldn't be trademarked), and part was to end constant confusion with The Villages, the famous retirement community in Central Florida. West Villages lives on as a district within Wellen Park, and Gran Paradiso sits right inside it.

Today Wellen Park spans roughly 11,000 acres and is planned for tens of thousands of residents at build-out, complete with its own walkable downtown, lakefront dining, and CoolToday Park, the spring training home of the Atlanta Braves — all just minutes from Gran Paradiso's gates.

Life in Gran Paradiso Today

The community that emerged from all that history is now largely built out and settled into its identity. A few thousand residents call Gran Paradiso home, a mix of retirees, seasonal residents, and working families drawn by the location and the amenity package. The centerpiece is a grand clubhouse with a resort-style pool and spa, fitness center, saunas and steam rooms, tennis and pickleball courts, a game room, and poolside cabanas — the kind of setup that makes every day feel a little like a vacation.

Location does a lot of the heavy lifting, too. Gulf beaches like Manasota Key and Venice Beach are about twenty minutes away, historic downtown Venice offers theaters, a symphony, and an art scene, and Warm Mineral Springs and a network of nature parks are close at hand. The address is a quirk of the area's layered history: Gran Paradiso carries a Venice zip code while officially sitting within North Port's city limits, a legacy of that 2002 annexation.

A Paradise with Roots

It's easy to look at Gran Paradiso's fountains and Tuscan facades and see just another polished Florida community. But the land tells a longer story — of ranching families who worked it for generations, of a development that nearly didn't survive its first chapter, and of a region that reinvented itself more than once along the way. From Berry Ranch to Taylor Ranch to Thomas Ranch, from West Villages to Wellen Park, the names have changed, but the appeal of this stretch of Southwest Florida hasn't. Gran Paradiso just gave it a gate, a clubhouse, and a very fitting name.