Join us to discover ethics and principles of permaculture, natural systems, aquaculture, sustainable design methods, patterns in nature, land restoration, water harvesting, grey water recycling, food forests and guilds, energy conservation, appropriate technology, renewable energy, urban permaculture and invisible structures.
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Between 21-25 March we will host Xana Piteira and Maria Rute Costa from Orla Design that will show us a pattern language for more conscious collaboration from small start-ups to large international networks. As people are looking for less hierarchical models to collaborate, we need structures and processes that will enable effective cooperation and transformation of conflict into opportunities to learn and grow. Sociocracy 3.0 training is a practical 4 day guide for evolving agile and resilient organizations of any size.
The “Zero Waste” Youth Exchange will take place in Sunseed on 12-19 October 2018! Participants from Spain, Italy and Portugal will explore environmental awareness, social inclusion and will have an inspiring opportunity to experience life in a sustainable eco-community.
During the course you will discover how your individual behaviour can make a big change towards a sustainable future and to learn tools for a better integration with the social and natural environment. There will be both theoretical and practical activities about upcycling, permaculture, circular economy and the “zero waste” philosophy.
You can find more details here.
The “Zero Waste” is a Youth Exchange will take place in Sunseed on 12-19 October 2018! The application process is closed, but you can still follow us to see the news about this event here.
The project has been financed by the Erasmus+ programme. The costs related to accommodation and food will be completely covered by the hosting organisation and the travel costs will be covered according to the Erasmus+ standards. Please refer to your national organization to organize the travel.
Join us on Saturday 17th of March for a lunch and an afternoon full of music and meditation, open to everyone 🙂 The friends of Sunseed and Los Molinos – Armelle, Etienne, Igor and Terese – are going to visit us and offer an immersive experience bringing their instruments (sitar, Tibetan bowls and tuning forks) and spiritual experience.
Have a look at a detailed schedule below:
We will open and close the door for each separate part, to hold the meditative space during the respective experiences, so please be punctual 🙂
The mantra singing will be very open letting participants also join later in the evening if there is the energy to sing and play together.
Entrance fee per session: donation based
On the 23th of April, an open doors day was held in Los Molinos del Rio Aguas, with a varied and rich market on the main street of the village. This Open Day was held on the main street of the village to emphasis the vibrancy life of the rural village. Our aim was to give people from the outside the opportunity to better know this beautiful place and to strengthen the connection between its inhabitants and neighbors who live in the surrounding area. The village also wanted to offer a showcase to artisanal and local products, as many people living here are involved in a way of living and producing that is more sustainable and empowering, both for the environment and for the people.
Moreover, it was a beautiful day for spending quality time, stories and food. We enjoyed a nice lunch together with our visitors, a big, vegan and tasty meal for everyone who wanted to join, very satisfying especially for the people who went to the Nacimiento walk led by Andrés Perez, from the local association Amigos de Sorbas. Like always the walk is an interesting moment of connection with nature and the threatening of our ecosystem. As we know an ecocide is happening and is increasingly endangering for the river, the animals and all the people who live in the area. It was also a very productive day as we had a nice chat with some activists from Almeria that proposed to us to organize together an informational talk about the ecocide. We are already working on this event that will be held on the 24th of May in La Oficina. We are very glad new ideas and new connections grew on this sharing day! We hope we can all keep up this productive and beautiful energy!
Last week we had the amazing opportunity to receive a very interesting and practical training on sociocracy and peacemaking, two great tools for running non-hierarchical organizations as well as for good communication and consent decision-making within communities. Deborah and Root, former managing director and education manager of the Newbold Trust, hosted the workshop and shared their valuable experience of community living with us.
Even though Sunseed had already been benefiting from the implementation of sociocratic principles, learning more about them and receiving some practical training is a way of making our community even more socially sustainable. Since it gives a structural base for ever-changing groups, sociocracy fits particularly well at Sunseed, which frequently sees people coming and going. By introducing new policies on interpersonal communication, decision-making, roles, feedbacks, peace and conflict resolution, we want to ensure an enjoyable as well as effective functioning of the project.
On this 2-day course, we were able to bring up recurrent issues and concerns, to show our appreciation for each other and to start thinking about what we could be doing even better in terms of communication. We can now practice and put into place the ideas and tools we were given, especially regarding trust building, peace designing and role modeling and reviewing.
Taking the course together, practicing gratitude and sharing ideas – as well as ending the weekend on a lighter, partying note – seem to have developed more empathy and social cohesion among us. A beautiful experience in the moment, which will hopefully be perpetuated.
Some impressions from the participants:
“Root and Deborah form an amazing duo, who complete each other’s information. Their openness and the examples given from their own life experience helped break the ice and encourage us to speak up.”
Margrit, Organic Gardens Assistant
“These two days allowed us to sharp our tools, which should result in putting less effort in work and get better results thanks to the use of non-violent communication components.”
Atreyu, Long Term Volunteer
“This course set a stepping stone in our process of growing as a community. Deborah and Root facilitated the sessions in a way that made the decision-making both effective and fun, while the peace-making tools they offered boosted our self-trust as individuals and as a group.”
Dario, Communication Coordinator
“I believe Sociocracy can lead to more peace within communities, especially when many different cultures and nationalities are represented. It can offer us a ‘being a family’ feeling.”
François, Long Term Volunteer
“Thanks to this course and the teachers sharing their own experience, we are able to separate a bit from our work constraints and be with each other in a more personal way. We learnt how to communicate calmly and with respect, as well as improving our personal well-being. I can see how this can also be beneficial for future participants in our project.”
Jenny, Office Assistant
“What an inspiring, empowering, and energizing hands-on course! A true gift to our community, carefully adjusted to our specific needs, and bringing smiles to everyone’s faces. Both a sense of individual empowerment and of common purpose were fostered, generating a joyful
motivation to apply these tools in our community life here.”
Armelle, Facilitation Coordinator
Last week our village has been transformed by a big event that brought together the different projects based here and many other people for the defense of water and our ecosystem. As we have been denouncing in the past years, the fresh water spring of the Río Aguas is getting every year dryer because of a super-intensive plantation of olive trees that takes most of its water from the aquifer.
We organized this day to invite everybody in the surrounding to come and see with their eyes the unicity of this place and the beauty of the hundreds of species that survive in the middle of the desert thanks to this scarce resource.
We would like to thank all the people that shared with us this beautiful time and all that helped in its organisation. We were very happy to meet many local people who took this chance to come to Los Molinos maybe for the first time. Many came from Almeria and some even from Murcia, and we hope to welcome them again in this amazing landscape.
If you want to be updated about the campaign against the ecocide in Los Molinos del Río Aguas, visit the campaign’s facebook page.
As a part of our living and learning together, there are moments in Sunseed when we gather to share ideas and knowledge about one topic that could be of general interest. We call it seminar and yesterday we had the pleasure of listening to Lizzie, our sustainable living coordinator, introducing the basic concepts of food sovereignty.
As a topic it may seem quite abstract, but in fact it is stricly related to what we do everyday growing our own food and building networks with local farmers. Maybe for this reason we were quite a lot sharing our ideas in the terrace behind the main house.
Lizzie told us that as a concept, food sovereignty was first framed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina at the World Food Summit in 1996, and it is rooted in the ongoing global struggles over control of food, land, water, and livelihoods. Food sovereignty is a movement growing from the bottom up, from the farmers, fishers, indigenous peoples and landless workers most impacted by global hunger and poverty. Food sovereignty goes beyond ensuring that people have enough food to meet their physical needs. It asserts that people must reclaim their power in the food system by rebuilding the relationships between people and the land, and between food providers and those who eat.
“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”
Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty, Mali, 2007
Food sovereignty is based on four principles:
Finally, Lizzie invited us to pay attention to all the processes that bring food on our table and to acknowledge them not treating food as a commodity. She also encouraged us to be aware of local plants and herbs and to use the as medicines. It could be easy to find meaning and happiness living simply in harmony with nature.
Last week a group of 68 geography students from the Liverpool John Moores University spent an afternoon with us at Sunseed. They had the chance to visit the place where we live and to see how our community is living sustainably.
They walked the path that runs along our irrigation line and met the people who are working to restore it after the storm, allowing them to understand how important it is for the existence of our village. They also saw how the ram pump works: this system provides the whole village with running water without using any energy apart from gravity.
The students also shared a nice tea break with us and visited our gardens and the arboretum, a nursery where local plants are grown to repopulate the dry slopes around us. Here is where we investigate the interactions between the local flora and different species of fungus that can help it to face adverse climatic conditions. Other aspects they had the chance to discover were our waste water system and our solar panels.
Most of the visitors were impressed by the fact that such a lively community is able to live off-grid in this impressive and hard landscape. For us this was a grat opportunity to get all the team and volunteers together to welcome them and to share the valuable learnings we have here.
Sunseed, as an educational center, welcomes visits from schools, universities and individuals interested in learning from our experience of more than 30 years living sustainably in a semi-arid region. If you are interested in our activities, please contact us!
13th – 26th November 2016
Arrival Sunday 13th 5pm
Departure Saturday 26th 10am
15th – 28th January 2017
Arrival Sunday 15th 5pm
Departure Saturday 28th 10am
The “10 days intensive cob building course” is a hands-on practical learning experience with small theoretical sessions. During the course we are going to build a small shed out of cob – from the foundations to the roof.
You will learn how to make a perfect cob mix, how to build with cob, how to build window and door frames, how to build a roof and how to give the walls a nice finishing.
The courses takes place in the Sunseed Education Centre on Sustainable Living within the frame of the Eco-Construction Department. Sunseed has been an education centre since 1986 and is based in Los Molinos del Rio Aguas, a small off-grid village in Andalucia in southern Spain, one hour from Almeria.
During the course you will learn about:
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |
| Tour of Sunseed Presentation about Cob | Trench and foundation Theory and practice | Soil test and suitability Tools Mixing Cob Building walls | Building walls Door frame | Building walls Inserting glass bottles |
| Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 |
| Building Walls Inserting Windows Inserting glass bottles | Making the roof | Making the roof Inserting niches | Rendering Inserting niches | Rendering Closing up and feedback |
Michael Hart is the Eco Construction coordinator in Sunseed and will be the main instructor for the course.
Sunseed is an education centre for sustainable living and will provide the structure and spaces for the retreats. With a view to educate on low impact lifestyles, Sunseed focuses on Eco-Construction, Organic Gardening, Drylands management, Appropriate Technology and Sustainable Living.
Sunseed is located in a small village, Los Molinos del Rio Aguas, in Southern Andalucia, Spain. Abandoned during the rural exodus of the 1950s and 60s, Los Molinos has experienced a vibrant resurgence since the 1980s and is the hub of numerous ecological and progressive organisations including Sunseed Desert Technology, Cultura de la Tierra and Pita Escuela.
The stunning arid landscape that sourounds Los Molinos and its location in a lush oasis in the middle of the desert provide the opportunity for quiet contemplation and observation of nature.
You could make the most of your trip by combining it with some time off to explore the area and visit the nature reserve Cabo de Gata, the beaches along the Costa del Sol or drive up to the mountain range of Las Alpujarras or the Sierra Nevada.
The closest airports are Almeria (1 hour) and Murcia (1,5 hours) and Granada (2 hours).
10 day cob building 12 days, 13 nights €495
Prices include all materials and instructions, basic accommodation and three meals per day (delicious, local and vegetarian).
Sleeping facilities will be in dormitories, with access to toilets, showers and electricity.
Click here.
Email: michaelhart86@hotmail.com
Tel: +34 9511 90263