A few of us in Benfeita have got together to form a wholefood coop. Anyone within what you regard as a reasonable distance of Benfeita (where the orders will be delivered) is welcome to join.

The coop is an informal group, has no legal standing, is non-profit, and is run by members on a purely voluntary basis for our mutual benefit. There’s no joining fee or anything like that. The only rule is that no member seeks to profit from others voluntary effort, so no setting up business selling products bought through the coop.

We have just placed our first order with Essential Trading Coop in Bristol, UK, and figure on ordering roughly every 3 months to guarantee free delivery, which we get if we order over a certain amount. Deliveries can become more frequent if enough people join to qualify more frequent orders for free delivery.

While ordering primarily from Essential just now, we are concerned about food miles and about encouraging the growth of organic food in Portugal, so our long term aim is to be able to source local suppliers who can provide a comparable range of organic produce at similar prices. It’s also a potential outlet for any coop members supplying organic produce.

We have set up an online forum for order sharing – not just for the big Essential order, but for any smaller orders people are making as individuals from local suppliers as well – coop admin, member advertising and all manner of other communication. There’s a lot of potential savings to be made buying as a group beyond wholefoods. Take a look at the forum for examples. If you’re in this area and want to join, details are on the forum. It’s all in the early stages right now and will become what members make it, so if you have some good ideas, get involved!

The pudding making underway. JCB standing by to lift the lid back on.

Local estrangeiros show off their crafts.

The Pardieiros drum band.

The brass band from Coja.

Arroz doce with traditional cinnamon decoration.

For at least the last two years, this vision of us designing and building our own autonomous house and growing our own food has felt so electric, so imminent, it’s been like living with a massive thundercloud hovering in the air above us, only waiting for a lightning bolt to bring it all down to earth. I looked around for possibilities locally in Scotland, then widened my search to the rest of the UK, then France, Spain, Bulgaria, Dominica, Oregon, British Columbia, New Zealand … but for one reason or another, none of these places seemed either ‘right’ or possible. Portugal didn’t even appear on the radar. Yet the feeling that sooner or later we were going to get zapped just got stronger and stronger.

In the summer of 2008, some good friends (and co-ecodreamers) suggested we all went to stay and work on an organic smallholding together for a while to see if we felt as good about it in practice as we did in theory. Jaded by the second successive year of the sun’s non-appearance through a Scottish summer and a growing season of barely 6 weeks, initial thoughts revolved around Spain, but nothing there worked out until, after a largely accidental trail of connections, we ended up booked to stay at Quinta das Abelhas in Central Portugal. We set off at the end of September with a mounting excitement fed by all we’d begun to discover about what was going on there.

Arriving in Portugal

Working on the quinta

That’s when it happened. Crack! Cloudburst! And literally at that – the first drops of a spectacularly torrential downpour started to fall the very moment we stepped off the train in Santa Comba Dão on the final leg of our journey.

All the advice on the subject of moving abroad tells you to spend time in the country, get to know it and its people, explore, rent a property there awhile, and only then think about moving. And it is very good advice, because so often it’s hard to differentiate between sound intuition and delusional projection. Yet there I was, with my feet on Portuguese soil less than 12 hours, knowing this was the place where the vision would turn into substance. Ho hum.

Things continued to happen at lightning speed when we returned to Scotland. After ten days or so looking at numerous internet property sites and trying to get a sense of different areas, I stumbled on a blog by a couple who had stayed in a place I was interested in. I emailed them to ask about it. The property wasn’t for us, but Pete & Cynthia knew of somewhere that might be, close to Benfeita, one of the aldeias do xisto (schist villages) of the Serra do Açor. We came back to Portugal within a month and, despite looking at several other places, it was clear that we’d found the place (or rather, it had found us) straight away. A price was agreed with the owner and we shook hands on the deal on November 8th.

After shaking hands on the deal

Quinta do Vale

In January (mais ou menos) we return to complete the paperwork, and the adventure begins!