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!

Wall Brown (Lasiommata megera).

Holly Blue (Celastrina argiolus) on the Nespera tree (Eriobotrya japonica).

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) on nettles.

Camberwell Beauty (Nymphalis antiopa), from both sides.

A Comma (Polygonia c-album) on our freshly-dug vegetable beds.

We’ve also seen many Common Brimstones (Gonepteryx rhamni) and Orange Tips (Anthocharis cardamines), though they tend not to settle long enough to capture with a camera.

A bunch of caterpillars weaving webs on honeysuckle. After Googling around, we think they’re the caterpillars of the Marsh Fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia)

And finally, the very rare and exquisitely beautiful Narcissus triandrus subsp lusitania which are only found in the area around Côja, Central Portugal. Generally has one head, but sometimes two and occasionally three. The whole plant stands about 5 inches (130mm) tall with the visible yellow part about 1 inch (25mm) long. It grows in open space and flowers in February/March.

Petition against the project and details here.

O projecto de construção da nova IC 6, entre Tábua, Oliveira do Hospital, Lagos da Beira, e Seia.

Petição contra o projecto aqui.

After 3 days of trying to cram an ever increasing number of bits and pieces into the tent, I woke up this morning and moved up to the house, cleaned the dust, maize stalks, olive pits and eucalyptus leaves off the old table and set up a kitchen. With coffee on the brew, fresh orange juice to hand, and this for my morning view, I’m seriously wondering what else I need.

Here’s the kitchen. The angle on the table is the table, not me.

And here’s my bedroom.

I’m meeting many more people in the area. There are a large number of estrangeiros here, more than a few who’ve been here more than 10 years, quietly living and working in the hills and valleys around the village. Perhaps it’s just these rosy-tinted spectacles I have on right now, but when communication is relaxed and unhurried, gentle and generous, it feels so much more genuine. There is a deep peace here, a timeless rhythm that’s simultaneously soothing, reaffirming and reinvigorating. Whether it’s there objectively or not matters not — life is hard for everyone in its own way — what matters is that it’s possible to touch what’s essential and feel that deep contentment that fills the void no amount of possessions or rushing about can fill.

Quite what I’d do without the laptop though is another thing …

On the way, we had clear views through the mountains towards snow-capped Torre, Portugal’s highest mountain in the Serra da Estrela.

Piódão is reached from any direction by at least 20-30km of single track roads through steep mountains, 50% dirt track most of the way we came, with a notable shortage of crash barriers, but we still ran into a coach party and a brand spanking new megahotel when we arrived, the latter looking completely incongruous and way out of scale, time and place perched on a ridge overlooking the village.

Piódão is about the same size as Benfeita and touristy, but neither slick, sick, lobotomised nor prostituted enough to have lost its soul or become a caricature of itself … yet. Stallholders and restauranteurs hustled, but nicely and with some genuine humanity, and without the in-your-face ruthlessness, relentlessness and cynicism encountered in the more jaded tourist towns of the Algarve, like Faro. The food we ate was fine and some of the local craftwork on sale not only useful but reasonable value.

Even in January, it was difficult to see how any more vehicles could have been crammed into the village’s only parking area, so perhaps it’s this limitation that saves its sanity for now.

Piódão exemplifies the typical narrow stone streets, slate roofs and schist walls of the aldeias do xisto (schist villages) of the Serra do Açor.

Typical street in Piódão – everything made of stone

Slate roofs, schist walls

The blue doors of Piódão

Piódão church – ornate and finely crafted icing sugar confectionary in stark contrast to the ubiquitous rough organic natural stone

It’s this. To write something vaguely coherent about our experience, to boil it all down into a few (though doubtless still too many) paragraphs, I had to take a step back from it all.

As soon as I did this, reflecting on the 6½ weeks between first setting foot in Central Portugal, this decade at least, and shaking hands on the purchase of a property here, this startling degree of coherence emerged in the pattern of events like a image emerging from a random collection of pixels. It was a lightbulb moment. This is what I should be paying more attention to — pattern, process and coherence. Of course I know this already — it’s what I’ve spent the last decade and more doing workwise, and it’s very much part of the principles of permaculture as well — but somehow putting it into practice in my own day-to-day life I still keep tripping over my own feet.

There’ve been so many moments in the last month, particularly with the £’s precipitous plunge against the €, when I’ve wondered just what on earth I’m doing and whether premature senility hasn’t set in already. So many things to potentially go pear-shaped! What if I’m wrong about this being ‘the place’? What if I run out of money? What if I’m not actually capable of building a house? What if …? Wha …

But from a step further back it’s much easier to see that the craziness isn’t in what I’m doing but in what I’m thinking; in rational mind trying to be master instead of servant. Instead of focusing on what it does best — designing plans and systems, devising solutions, sorting paperwork, checking consistency and coherence — I’ve been allowing it to fret about things over which it has no dominion, driving me nuts. The sense and sensibility in the pattern and process will take care of itself. It’s that lesson about getting out of our own way; trusting, working with nature, not against it. Creating a synergy of rationality and intuition rather than regarding them as mutually exclusive choices.

Ema, who has an ability to see straight through to the essentials and no patience for endless discussion or prevarication, said it all as usual. The moment she set foot on Quinta do Vale she laid claim to the small house, picked up a hoe and started cleaning steps of overgrowth. The other properties we viewed she didn’t engage with and was soon bored. She shouldn’t have needed to add “For f**ks sake mother, this is the place. Just buy it.” But she did, because the biggest idiots in this world are the ones who can’t see what’s in front of their noses and think that our minds contain all the answers somewhere if we can just be clever enough with them.

What is extraordinary too is how much this feels like the beginning of a love affair. There’s that power of a thought or image to evoke senses and sensations. Clicking through my collection of images of the quinta and selecting ones for the site it really starts to dawn on me just what a stunningly beautiful place this is. An image of the sun’s play on autumn vegetation: straight away I can smell the pines and hear the church bell chime the time from the village below. And it’s a really nice church bell too, with a melodious tone that feels like a sonic caress. An image of the fruit terraces below the larger building (which will become our house): the sound of the little waterfall trickles into my head and immediately I’m thinking that’s a sound I’d be content to listen to for the rest of my life.

OK, that’s more than enough cringingly cliché-ridden schmaltz for one day. Mind deplores that kind of nonsense. It’s so uncool. And really, do I have to use the word ‘really’ quite so much? Because at last it’s really, really real? Mind says “not until you sign the papers, hen!”. Technically correct, of course. But right now I’m with the feeling and the sounds and smells and sense of trust and honour in a handshake. It feels like the right way to start this project. Though of course I’ll be making sure the paperwork is correct too. Synergy, not schizophrenia.

Happy Solstice/Christmas/New Year!

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!