We are Harriet and Mauro, a thirty-something husband and wife team, plus Tofu the chihuahua. In 2020 we moved to Spain after having spent the last 5 years in the UK. We were in search of a simpler, more resilient and community-focused way of life close to our family in the Valencia region.

Shortly after moving here, we found the perfect place to start working towards our dreams: a beautiful, but run-down, 4 acre smallholding in the hills of Castellón, Spain.

This is a young project, started in February 2021, and we are relatively inexperienced but very enthusiastic hortelanos who are learning as much as we can about everything we can!

We are currently beginning to produce our own food and are also working on the restoration of an old stone masía. There is also another stone ruin on the site which in the long term we hope to be able to turn into a family home. We are incredibly lucky to have access to some wonderful terraces, irrigated via water from a natural spring, and our plan is to restore the traditional irrigation system and start producing food for our community.

We are currently running our smallholding organically (not certified) and we are inspired by the collection of techniques and practices generally bundled under the terms of "permaculture" and "regenerative agriculture". We are also interested in natural building and fibre crafts and hope to soon have the time and resources to develop these interests further.

We are fully off-grid on our site. We have solar panels, spring water and wood-fired heating, and we try to get by with handtools as much as possible. We search out scrap and salvaged materials, and attempt to build with natural materials and simple systems, buying new only when we cannot avoid it. We have many dreams and ambitions for this land - you can read about some of them in our first newsletter .

We believe that what we are building here must be resilient and sustainable for the future. We want to learn and embody the older, simpler, gentler ways of living - lifeways that work with nature to complement it, not deplete it. Practices which restore some of what has been lost, instead of constantly trying to extract more and more until we're left with dust and rock. We don't mind trading a little "comfort" (although we'd say we're perfectly comfortable!) for the satisfaction of doing as little harm as we can, experiencing the seasons more viscerally and keeping ourselves fit and healthy by doing things manually instead of with machines.

We began documenting our journey fairly early on, via a newsletter which we wrote for friends and family, and later began filming odd bits and pieces for our YouTube channel.

We don't pretend to know what we're doing - but we hope you might be interested in following our journey!