My journey exploring community living and starting Ecoaldeia Guarda Rios.
I am Hari, from the UK, growing up in Brighton. I studied Biochemistry at Bath University and lived in Bristol for five years, mostly in a van. I first started exploring intentional community building in 2011, after finishing University and realising I didn’t want to live the mainstream life that University had been trying to prepare me for. I was living back in Brighton and discovered Sussex Cohousing, which at that time was two founders looking for more co founders via a recruitment event. I joined the team and volunteered time working with them for two years to start building the foundations of the project model. I held a secretary role and gained experience in Sociocracy, facilitation tools, meeting structure, project management and authentic communication. I left this project because I had moved to Bristol and wanted to find a community project I could live in sooner than the 8+ year timeframe of cohousing projects. I lived in a van and experienced living off-grid with solar power and a wood burner, finding green spaces to park next to and some farm projects on the edge of the city that I helped at. Soon after moving to Bristol, in 2015, I met the initiator of a project called ‘Abolish Empty Office Buildings’ (AEOB) - a project to buy empty commercial property in Bristol and convert it into not-for-profit social housing. I became one of the founding directors so that we could form a charity cooperative and raise money through a community share offer. I was working voluntarily as the coop secretary and helping to create the website, set up the community share offer and work with the architect. We successfully raised more than £300,000 from private investors by selling community shares. We used this to buy a building and converted it into six apartments using a bank mortgage loan. It opened in 2017, housing 10 people, though I had left by then, as I decided to move away from city life and explore land-based living more deeply.
I started with workaway stays at projects in Wales, then Spain when Wales got too cold and wet. I visited a range of projects, including permaculture farms, an ashram and a mushroom growing project. I was inspired by the one planet living movement in Wales, and imagined something similar in Southern Europe. I arrived in Portugal in Spring 2018 and went to my first Rainbow Gathering near Marvao in Central East Portugal. I then moved to some land with people I met at the gathering and stayed there for two and a half years exploring how to start a long term community farm based on Rainbow Gathering culture. From this I learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work, and gained confidence and inspiration about starting a new project. I had bought a yurt on that land and took it with me to try living in a few existing projects which wanted to convert into shared ownership. I was sharing my experience and advocating creating a cooperative, but when it came to it, there was usually too much resistance by the owners to share ownership.
I decided to try starting an ecovillage project from the beginning by renting property and inviting people to join me and create a group who would then buy the rented property, or look for another. I held a four week gathering in Autumn 2020 to explore how to form a group. We learned a lot, but couldn’t continue with that land. https://quintadapazpovoa.wordpress.com/gathering-blog/
In 2021, I moved to South Portugal with my yurt to experience the milder winters. I tried again joining a few existing projects, and joined a three month coliving experience in a big villa with eight people to explore what is the culture we wish to live in. We shared our skills in different practices of communication, connection, expression, visioning, and at the end of the time, we ran a small 3 day retreat to share the best of the practices for community building. After this, I decided to try renting a house again and invite people to live with me and create a start-up ecovillage team. I was cooking and participating at a regneralive culture gathering in Sintra, where I met people who then joined the house.
By Autumn, a team began to form and we were creating a shared project vision and looking for land for sale in the Algarve and South West Alentejo. We concluded that the land there is too dry, with overexploited aquifers and too much eucalyptus, so we decided to move more North.
We moved to a rented place close to the Serra da Estrela mountains in January 2022 and continued to build the project foundations and look for land in the area. By April we had found an ideal land and had an offer accepted and were in the process of agreeing a promissory contract, but realised we were not yet ready or confident enough as a team. We were a bit burned out by rushing into making the offer and pushing ourselves to get ready to recruit more team members. We took a break and stayed in contact, but didn’t get back together.
I was determined to continue the momentum and look for another place to rent, when I heard that the couple who own Quinta do Guarda Rios wanted to create an ecovillage there. I had been there for a sweat lodge in February and liked the land, so I went to talk to them in May and agreed to move my yurt there and find out if we could collaborate.
After some weeks of discussion, they decided that they had lost momentum and so offered to sell the land to me for the Ecovillage project. I had been offered some money from my family when I was with the previous team, so it was a possibility and a perfect opportunity.
I took some time considering the features of the property in comparison to the land criteria created with the previous team. I was staying there with a friend who was helping me work on a first draft of a permaculture design to assess the suitability for the ecovillage project. We found that the property met a lot of the criteria, with only a few compromises. For example, the proximity of the road gives some exposure and noise, but on the other hand, it also gives good access, and we could imagine siting the home plots away from the road and planting more trees as privacy and noise barriers.
In my considerations, I felt that in balance, it felt like the universe was presenting me with a good option and I wanted to trust myself to follow the momentum without overthinking or striving for the ‘perfect’ land.
I accepted the suggestion to buy the land and in June and July negotiated the terms of a promissory contract. I was grateful for the relationship with the owner and her openess to give me lots of time in the promissory contract in which to create the project and complete the purchase. I trusted that I would have time to invite people and create a group and/or find investors to fund the land purchase and so went ahead with the contract. Thus the Guarda Rio Ecovillage project was born!
Reference: other community living projects I have worked on:
Sussex Cohousing, Co-founder, part time for 2 years
Abolish empty office buildings cooperative, Co-founding Director and Secretary, part time for 1.5 years
Ecomotive co-operative, involved for 2 years including a few festivals with their demonstration tiny house
Glastonbury Festival permaculture garden for several weeks each year for 4 years
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