Sustainable Living

Social Permaculture

Permaculture applied to people, not just land: Tamera's decades of community-building, the courses at Terra Alta near Sintra, and rural learning centres like Re.Rural in São Luís. Designing fairer, more connected ways of living together.

4 Projects

Projects in this focus

Social permaculture in Portugal

Most community projects that fail do not fail on the water system. They fail on decision-making, money and who does the dishes. Social permaculture is the attempt to design that side with the same care usually reserved for the land.

Tamera has been working on it near Odemira since 1995 and publishes what it learns. Terra Alta teaches it alongside land design near Sintra. Vale Ondula runs a living lab in the north, The Hide hosts co-living in a valley near Oleiros, and PurposeFlow and Nature of Life are building the same thing in the Alentejo and the western Algarve.

If you are considering joining or starting a community, this is the reading to do first. See also intentional communities, ecovillages and cooperatives and collectives. Dated activities from these projects are listed in our events calendar.

Where these projects are