Model Mark Vanderloo is a tireless traveler who always keeps a suitcase packed. Born in the Netherlands, he spent his early years in Kenya, where he attended an English-style boarding school. By age 8, he was back in the Netherlands, and by the time he turned 20, he was living in Paris.

“I’ve traveled all over the world—and I still do a lot of traveling—and I developed a big interest in real estate,” says the 51-year-old Vanderloo. He spends a significant amount of time at his home in Amsterdam, where Mark, his 14-year-old son, and Emma Paula, his 15-year-old daughter, go to school.

He also owns a home in the tiny European principality of Andorra, a place he first discovered a quarter of a century ago on a ski trip, while he was living in Ibiza. “I had moved to Ibiza to get away from New York,” he says.

(Andorra, which has a population of 77,000, covers only 181 square miles and is the sixth-smallest nation in Europe.) That jet-set lifestyle was all part of the life of a successful international model.

In the 1990s, when his international modeling career took off, Vanderloo became the image of Hugo Boss, Armani, Calvin Klein, Versace, Valentino, and Donna Karan and the star of advertising campaigns for the likes of Peugeot, Banana Republic, the Italian fashion house Trussardi, and Guess.

Still one of the most successful male models in the fashion industry, in the last year alone, Vanderloo has appeared in campaigns for Dior and Armani as well as in photo stories in the U.S. and international editions of GQ Magazine and L’Uomo Vogue.

Despite his self-proclaimed status as a citizen of the world, Vanderloo has found that the tiny principality has become his “home away from home.” Nearly a decade after first visiting, he bought his first apartment in the village of El Tarter, north of the town Canillo in the capital city of Andorra la Vella.

Since then, he’s made it his mission to tell the world about this “little gem” with sublime ski slopes, splendid shops, and warm, welcoming residents.

“Andorra is a completely different world,” says Vanderloo, who is now a brand ambassador for Andorra Sotheby’s International Realty.

While he was once afraid a ski-town home might be boring, he says, Andorra is anything but. It’s a combination of a quiet getaway and an exciting area, complete with “beautiful stone houses, sun, beaches, restaurants, hiking in the summer, and the best internet service in Europe.”

In addition to skiing and real estate, Vanderloo’s other passions include gastronomy—he loves the culture behind Far Eastern cuisines—and poker.