Sustainable Living in Portugal - by Jonathan Evelight

Living on the Edge - Seeking sustainable living in Portugal

(published in Living Lightly and Permaculture Magazines)
— by Jonathan Evelight, March 2005

There are some places on this earth where a more natural and sustainable living is not just possible, it’s happening, where the old ways are still alive and can provide a stepping-stone to the future. A year or so on after leaving England in search of such a place and a new life this is our view on what’s possible in Alentejo, Portugal.

If we are honest most people would admit that present society isn’t working for many reasons. We may be encouraged that many people are now choosing to step out onto a self-determined path towards a more self-reliant, cooperative and sustainable lifestyle. If society hasn’t dropped you (from redundancy or other random causes), you may already be finding your own way of dropping out and into the life you really believe in. It was paying a mortgage on a house that Jack built that made me homeless for a while. Until I learned to take more control of my life along with the help of a lot of good people on the way. One thing is for sure; you get the life you believe in. After finally saving my rebuilt house from negative equity and imminent collapse, from its sale we could afford to move to a very different world. Every path is unique but maybe we can all agree where they will converge (if we are true to ourselves) – in a future that is built on the foundations of sustainability.

Now we are living in a Yurt on the fertile earth in the mid-South of Portugal – on the edge of change and at the beginning. And it’s wonderful. We being Jenny, ex-Solicitor’s clerk turned Permaculture designer and spinner, and Jonathan – a reformed solar energy engineer with a past life in computer networking. Our land is on the edge, (nature loves edges), of a broad plateau and the river Mira floodplain that wends its way to the nearby West coast. We share this land with its rammed earth dwellings and woodlands, inside the national park, with 7 other people right at the start of creating a cooperative community we call “Arco-Iris”, which is Portuguese for “rainbow” (it takes all sorts of colours to make an eco-neighbourhood). It’s a new beginning for us but for the locals already living here it’s a lifestyle that in many ways is way ahead of us. We have much to learn from their traditional ways.

Pig on a table honey in a jar

The more I stand on this red earth and look around the more I see natural abundance. You could easily miss it. Many Portuguese are land rich. Quite a few live a subsistence lifestyle unchanged probably in centuries. The bent old men and ladies all in black; they may be the last generation of their kind. To say that with them goes an ancient tradition of simple survival and a working knowledge of the land might not be far from the truth. If you are a purist their way may not be permaculture but the land has kept them in good stead for a lot longer than the EEC has been around – and there’s not much evidence of that in the outback.

Where else can one go in search of the bee keeper and, on finding his house, meet a group of men preparing the biggest pig on a table you ever saw and all the women gathered indoors talking together and be handed six kilos of fresh unlabelled honey for a few Euros?

Our neighbour is a constant inspiration. Yes he has a 30 year old mini-diesel tractor which he will use to plough the land. He also works his donkey. But I like his turned around bicycles, one with a mini-plough where the peddles used to be, the other with a flat blade and fork, which he pushes along between vegetable rows to remove the weeds. This is advanced technology!

Quite typically in the Alentejo region a good deal of barter goes on. Wine in exchange for olives growing in your field; Olive oil for mending a chain saw; dinner for all the family just for sharing a trip to the wood yard; even Chickens in exchange for old ceramic tiles! The mind boggles but it is happening all the time. It may take you an hour for the lad in the hardware shop to finally work out how much you owe him but it’s just these attitudes that protects the heartland of Portugal from the economic profiteering and political manipulation that has torn the heart out of western society.

Everywhere it is a common site to see people tending their own fruit and veg, keeping their own poultry and a few animals. And water - everyone has their own well or bore hole - so tragic we've lost our own in the UK across Europe and by doing so becoming so dependent on a national infrastructure. Let’s face it, water is life, and if you have got your own and are also growing a little food with neighbours, the political machine can pull its own plug, but you will be the first and most able to continue supporting your families.

Change is evident of course. Alentejo is between the Algarve, golf haven and tourist hot spot, and the North. Few tourists go further than the Monchique mountains just up from the Algarve. Last summer’s fires ravaged the Monchique area and few of the older Portuguese returned to their burnt out homes. It’s just too hard for them. Further in land the wealthier folk from Lisbon are beginning to buy up plots for seasonal use. But they’re not the only ones for the following reasons.

“Taipa” dream? You choose

When we first came to look for land in Portugal we started out in “the barranco”, the hilly outlying valleys of the Alentejo region. It was a delight but very hard work: moving earth for a building plot, cutting paths on the hillside, rebuilding a spring-fed cisterna, the beginnings of growing our own food. This is not an uncommon move for first timers it seems. You cut your teeth in the heartland and get to learn a lot about yourself and about how life works for this land.

Local planning is a refreshing contrast! If there is just a ruin on your land automatically you can rebuild. Usually you can build anyway as a percentage of the total area of your land. Respect for the land and local custom is a key that provides fertile ground for diy, low-impact, green and sustainable building.

“Taipa” or rammed earth building was the traditional way. The materials are free and families built their own. It’s lovely to see the abandoned ruins melting back into the landscape. Fortunately taipa is easy to repair too. Well insulated timber housing is also ideal as well for a steady temperature year round, although the wood has to be imported. There are several such dwellings for rebuild on our land and local knowledge is still available. Straw bale is also happening, thanks to a local Permaculture group, a method which when rendered has proven itself to be fire proof.

Our English friend bought a ruined dwelling, as one of three independent people. Alyson has rebuilt her section with local labour on a minimum budget. Her help mostly came from some German lads who live in a nearby settlement. Most of them jumped the Berlin wall and settled here. They’ve learnt not only how to rebuild and repair the old structures very well but also how to live simply like the natives.

John, who came out here at the same time and really knew nothing about self-sufficiency, also rebuilt his dwelling and is growing all his own food from three growing seasons a year. He has even mastered the rather abstruse Portuguese language!

Another couple we know have chosen to build a wooden house from a Swedish company. Their land is a woodland glade of mature cork oaks in a gently rolling landscape. Turn off the road toward their place and you might see candles lit in the wayside shrine. When it came to sinking a bore hole for water, like most English they expected a survey and a report from the little Portuguese “Aqua-engenheiro” man. He just looked about for a while, pointed and said “there is water!” He was right and more water than they had ever seen.

These examples would be incomplete without highlighting that of a Portuguese couple we met at a Permaculture gathering. They have built a "grand casa" big house in "taipa" rammed-earth the traditional way and to a very impressive and modern design. True, they had their architect re-train some local young people to do the rammed earth but the old building ways are by no means forgotten - and the local authorities are happy for you to do it. Their house also boasts reed-bed water filtration and a 100% solar electricity supply which is common. On the wall of their living room is engraved the permaculture adage "a problema e o soluçao"!

With permaculture as a common approach shared by all of us at Arco-Iris, we plan to rebuild together as much as we can, with local guidance and training opportunities shared with others who want to learn and regain these traditional skills.

One problem Portugal is beginning to face up to is the indiscriminate planting of vast tracts of eucalyptus. The site of ravaged landscapes often by Canadian logging firms which leave the earth depleted and almost useless is a sad sight. Grant aid for this practice is no longer available. I am told that industrial hemp, with such diverse uses as building material, diesel fuel oil, health food and cosmetics, is the only crop that can grow after eucalyptus. A solution for an impoverished soil and economy?

Land for all our futures?

Sustainable living includes people and their environment in sympathetic relationship and enhances both. It could be that shared land for cooperative living is a natural step that people will take as we move down that road, away from “just me and mine” to a sense of extended family, common bond and a larger wholeness.

Land is not expensive but neither is it cheap. Buying couldn’t be easier. All the conveyancing can be done by the agent. A Lawyer doesn’t do this work but will charge a lot of money. At the least an independent English speaking person you can trust to make sure you get your title deed or “cardinetta” is essential. Our agent would disagree about how easy it is however. She has often had to round up large families, once as many as 37 relatives, all crowded together in the Escritorio or registrar’s office to sign the land transfer deeds.

Dreams can come in all sizes: Single cottages in the wilder and wonderful barranco, very basic with a well and several acres can still be found. It is rare to find large plots suitable for creating a cooperative neighbourhood or eco-village – it has taken us three years to find the land we are on.

For those who appreciate life’s cooperative ways, several dwellings are often part of the one plot. Such a shared ownership scenario, like the “co-housing” model, can lend itself to all the benefits of resource sharing and social cohesion that can be found between a few like-minded people who design their own living environment. You have your own place but can share some of the land, the building work and the fun.

The fact that the Portuguese land and culture is still conducive for those seeking the self-sufficient and sustainable experience comes with a caution. On the one hand the typically English or Western habit of land speculation ruins any chance of affordable land access – for all of us. And what gives us the right to assume we are welcome in a foreign land if we haven’t first checked that our intentions are compatible with the life and the culture around us? Respecting our connections with each other and all living things has to be practised and enshrined in the agreements we make if a sustainable future is to have a chance. And on the other hand life can come seriously unstuck if one hasn’t shrugged off that old parent state dependency and learnt the basic survival skills to cope.

What comes first – land or people?

Jenny and I have made our choice. In the first year of neighbourly interaction, some good some bad, we realised that we had simply replicated our neighbourhood boundary experience from England without realising it. In other words we hadn’t thought enough about who we wanted to live with as our neighbours just where we wanted to live, a bit like young love, and despite our best goodwill and conflict resolving efforts, which in fact worked by and large (not all our neighbours were eco-friendly), we learnt that you can’t just go for land or live in isolation. We are meant to live together, at least cooperatively.

We are now moving to the next stage on the way to a more natural and sustainable lifestyle which, we believe, is a shared thing and a collective experience to be found in intentional groups with like-minded people; perhaps like the co-housing example hinted above, or even larger organic eco-settlements and villages.

Now we feel we are part of a neighbourhood, a bit like an extended family. There are nine of us presently with a flavouring of diverse backgrounds including Findhorn, Buddhism, Permaculture, DIY, family farming and much more besides. Our common glue we realised is we no longer fit into a society we feel we’ve disinherited but together we can live in a way how life is wanting people to be - fertile beginnings with more land and rebuildable dwellings on the edge of change.

One thing is for sure. We’ve learnt that living the dream of a sustainable life can be a test of self-reliance and a challenge for one’s comfort zone. Last year for us we learnt about water and earth and survival; the basics. This year, for example, we are both studying natural plant medicine. It’s another step of accepting that we can meet our own needs, and those around us, with less dependency on a society that cannot change itself until we have become less dependent on it. There’s no turning back.

What is “sustainable living” anyway?

í It’s an inner-sense of all things connected and inter-dependent,

í It’s our ability to willingly respond to whatever life brings,

í It’s knowing that we can really choose to live the life we believe in.

Contacts:

Jonathan + Jenny offer working holidays and workshops and welcome interest and sharing from anyone seeking the sustainable future. Email contact and web site: ola@rainbowcommunities.org.

Are you ready for cooperative living in an eco-village? The Integrated Eco-Village Questionnaire is a good place to check out your ideas: “http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ecovillage/question.htm"

Our Yurt in the Baranco does very nicely. Half way up a hill with on tap Spring water and Solar energy.