Construction & Housing

Building in Portugal means building for heat, for drought, and increasingly for fire. The techniques collected here answer that with mass, shade and materials that come from close by rather than from a container ship: earth, lime, cork, stone, straw and hemp.

Cânhamor produces hemp blocks in Portugal. Green Heritage supplies modular bio-construction kits. Around them sit builders working in cob, adobe and superadobe, and owners retrofitting old stone houses rather than replacing them, often the lowest-carbon option available, because the building already exists.

The focus filter above splits the collection into eco-building techniques, natural materials, hemp construction, superadobe and cob, renovation and retrofitting, circular building practices, passive solar design, earthships, green roofs and walls, and tiny homes. If you build this way in Portugal, we would like to list you. Dated activities from these projects are listed in our events calendar.