You cannot copy a blue zone. You can connect it.
For a year my son Aleksander and I sat with the people working on how long and how well we live: 39 countries and states, more than a hundred scientists, doctors and experts.
Every few years somebody promises to bottle a blue zone: the beans, the olive oil, the red wine, the daily walk. I understand the wish. My son and I walked through two of them, Okinawa and Sardinia, and I wanted to take them home too.
In August 2024 Paola Demurtas guided us through the villages around Baunei, in the Sardinian blue zone where she was born and raised. When my son asked her what makes the place what it is, she did not start with food:
“I can find probably the same olive trees or whatever, but not the sense of community that I have here.”
That is the part nobody can export. In her villages the old are never set aside; they are among the first to know when the family has an important decision to make. At the end of the day the men meet in the café to talk. The food matters, and so do the hills you climb every day. But what holds it together is people.
And Paola is the first to say that the life itself cannot simply be moved:
“It would be impossible today to replicate that life because you need to be isolated in the top of the mountain.”
So I have stopped asking how to copy a blue zone. The better question is how to connect one. Keep what the villages do best: the shared table, the elders at the heart of the family, the daily climb, the pleasure of it all. Then bring in what they never had, the best of modern medicine and of the science of ageing.
Connect the village and the laboratory, and the blue zones of the future can be anywhere.
That is the thought I came home with from Sardinia, and one of the reasons this quest did not end when the year did.
The whole day in Sardinia, with the shepherd who interrupted our interview, the goats, and a man over ninety who wanted another hundred years, is on the Live Beyond Hub under its own title:
The full article on the Live Beyond Hub
Alone for months, never lonely: what a Sardinian blue zone taught me about living longer
13-minute read · 13 photographs · 7× longer than this page
Written by Marek Piotrowski. If you would like the Longevity Map that sits behind all of this, it is free — ask for it here.
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