Los Portales turns 40!

In 2024, The Ecovillage Los Portales turned 40! This important celebratory milestone resonates deep within the network, highlighting the resilience, liveliness and longevity of the ecovillages, bringing hope to every member and beyond.

Read more about Los Portales’s journey and get inspired by the story written by one of its long-standing members – Kevin LLuch.

At the beginning of November 1984, the founding members – of what is today Los Portales—arrived. They brought a big dream, courage, inspiration, and youthful energy to start living and realizing that dream in very precarious conditions.

Everything had started years before in Brussels, where a group of people gathered around a Jungian therapist, embarking on a path of self-knowledge and personal evolution. In addition to psychodrama and other psychotherapeutic and/or shamanic techniques, the main tool of this work was dreams. Dreams are, for Jung, the royal road to accessing the hidden or unknown dimensions of ourselves. And it was dreams that shaped the collective desire to create a space where self-knowledge, learning to live together, self-sufficiency, and a fertile, co-creative relationship with the natural environment would coexist.

After ‘taking possession’ of the site, we began to build, and prepare the first food sources (vegetable garden, chickens, goats, etc.), and educate the first children as they arrived.

This anchoring in the place fostered a growing awareness of our deep connection with the environment. The intimate link between us and this land gradually emerged. Today, we are almost totally autonomous in terms of water and energy (solar, wind, and hydro). We draw water from our own wells and have developed a landscape water-retention system and holistic management to counteract the widespread erosion and desertification in our area. The garden is fully organic, combining biodynamic and permaculture farming principles.

To continue financing the work, some members remained in small urban communities to develop their professions and contribute funds to the project. For example, we created a language school with branches in Seville, Barcelona, and especially Madrid, which brought significant income to the community.

Another challenge in the early years was to build a harmonious relationship with the village residents and neighbouring farmers. Appreciating and respecting their way of life, while integrating elements of the local culture, allowed them to welcome our contribution to local life with respect and interest.

Today, we actively participate in our local environment through connections with local authorities, suppliers, experts in various fields, schools, universities, and various local and regional networks. We share our knowledge and practices with the wider community through guided tours, workshops, training courses, visits and retreats, volunteer programs, conferences, and a temporary membership program.

On a social level, our group structure evolved from the original, more vertical and ‘heroic’ leadership of the visionary who started the project to a more horizontal, integrative leadership that empowers members and strengthens group cohesion. This shift, which took several years, was a significant change for the group as a whole. Its culmination enabled the group to organize itself into a sociocratic structure. Each circle is fully responsible and has autonomy for decision-making, though the entire group meets regularly for decisions requiring everyone’s involvement. In addition to dream work, we use Process Work, Forum, and constellation tools to transform relational difficulties and conflicts. After this process, today we see ourselves less as a big family and more as a ‘small society.’ Los Portales is now a living being far greater than the sum of its parts. The quality of relationships and connections is central to nurturing this diverse and complex being, which is the community.

Our economy is based on the principle that everyone contributes according to their means and receives according to their needs, within a collectively agreed framework. We develop an ecosystem of enterprises and individual or group economic activities (the Los Portales bakery, visits, courses and workshops, therapies, etc.) that generate the necessary income to sustain and grow the project. Through our practice, we strive to redefine concepts such as wealth, work, and progress, and we strengthen various local and regional exchange networks in which we participate.

We aim to value diversity as a way to enrich our human and natural ‘ecosystem,’ while also becoming conscious of the patterns that connect and unify the whole.

We embrace a holistic vision, exploring the correspondences between inner and outer, above and below: both the aridity of our fields and our inner aridity, material abundance and the feeling of abundance that allows us to say ‘there is enough.’ We try to reduce as much waste as possible, starting with ‘emotional waste,’ which is often the hardest to recycle. We are also learning to enhance the group’s self-regulating aspects and collective intelligence, which strengthen its distinct identity.

Forty years later, our project has solid foundations, but if we had lost our daring, enthusiasm, creative ardour, and community spirit, Los Portales might no longer exist. Swimming against the individualistic and materialistic tide of dominant society compels us to stay alert, connected, and creative to offer a message of hope: that it is possible to live in dynamics of more collaboration and less competition, of more community and less individualism, that it is possible to restore harmony with natural intelligence and move away from reliance on machine intelligence, and that it is possible to prioritize human and relational wealth over material wealth.

Our experience shows that the spiritual dimension of the human being does not develop through adherence to a specific school, church, or belief system, but that spirituality arises when our hearts are open, light, and available in the service of a greater good. We seek and nurture beauty and art as ways to celebrate our achievements and connect with the essence and meaning of our project.

As the group matured, so did the challenge of responding to the changes and crises the world faces. We are not on the margins; everything happening in the world also affects us. We are not outside the system; rather, we are a dream of the system, a part of the system that seeks change and regeneration.

Co-creating an ecovillage for 40 years demonstrates to the system that other ways of living are possible. Today, our challenge is to spread the sense of community that animates Los Portales and contribute to creating other ‘islands of sanity’ like ours. A key stimulus on this path was connecting with both the Iberian Ecovillage Network and the Global Ecovillage Network, where the exchanges have been invaluable to us.

Over these years, many people from diverse backgrounds have come to know us and our work. Some brought curiosity, others brought collaboration, ideas, admiration, work, laughter, songs, material contributions, and, of course, some criticisms. We are still moved, as we were on the first day, by messages from people who, even years later, share how their time at Los Portales has inspired them and supported them in their own projects. To all of them, we can only offer heartfelt gratitude. These countless connections and fertile exchanges assure us that the impact of our community extends far beyond our beautiful piece of Andalusian land.

To honour both their creation over these 40 years and the infinite connections it has generated, Los Portales has decided to form the “Circle of Support for Los Portales” to strengthen and enrich all kinds of exchanges between the Community and all those who visit Los Portales, appreciate them and help them in so many different ways.

40th Anniversary Celebration in Los Portales, 26-27 October 2024