The funny thing about having a roof over your head

when you have chosen a life in nature

In 2017 my partner & I moved to rural Portugal, we knew where we were going but we had never visited this place before. Beneath a beautiful mountain set in the heart of the Beira Baixa, close to the most Portuguese village in Portugal. We had just come back from a year long trip in New Zealand living in a van, chasing waterfalls, fishing for our dinner & hanging out in caves with tiny penguins. Craving a life spent outdoors under the stars & cooking our meals on a campfire we jumped at the opportunity to move to a piece of land surrounded by nature & begin creating a future for ourselves free from the grips of a mortgage.

His parents had the idea to invest in the land in this area, they fell in love when visiting & purchased a five hectare property named Eagle Rock by the locals. More about that later. In the Spring of 2017 we packed our little self built camper van Velma & set out on this new adventure, spending twenty three hours on a ferry & then driving six hours through Spain.

When we arrived to the land we discovered it had a beautiful stone barn, olive trees, oranges, pears, plums, some other random fruits like quince & loquats, plenty of grapevines, four wells, a ridiculous amount of granite boulders & a small Eucalyptus coppice. The land had clearly been abandoned for decades, I am still not sure when the last people used this place, let alone lived here. We fell in love instantly with the landscape & the ancient history that shrouded the mountain, with olive trees centuries old, tiny stone buildings fit for hobbits, the milky way lighting up the night, the towering cork trees, it instantly felt like home. We slept in the van because the barn was exactly that… a barn. It had no insulation, holes in the walls, a hole for a window with shutters but no glass, a mud floor & plenty of years worth of straw, old boots & goat shit.

Those first months on the land we spent 99% of our time outside, we cleared a big area, fenced it & made our first ever garden. We cleared mountains of brambles, brush & broom. We made pathways through the land so we could move around, we cut endless amounts of mimosa trees to make space around the barn. We cooked outside, we ate outside, we worked outside, we slept outside in the Summer too. Fast forward to 2024 & here I am writing this inside the barn on a cold Winter day with my laptop plugged in to our humble solar system. The fire is lit, the roof is insulated (kind of, its temporary, more about that later) the floor is laid, the walls have been pointed, a “window” has been put it, we have a comfy sofa, a kitchen, a bed & now our life mostly exists inside this 7 by 5 metre stone building.

Last weekend we built a new fire pit outside because for the past year or two we have had a fairly comfortable living situation inside & so we have hardly bothered to sit outside around the fire - watching the stars, the sunset, the sunrise. We realised how much we actually missed it. We had almost given it up for comfort because let me tell you it was a brutal first few years on the land trying to survive the extreme weather. So, I decided to start writing to tell you how we got from there to here & how we are now getting back to there again. It has been a long & interesting process. We have to be mindful not to forget how we want to spend our time on this earth - to enjoy the seasons, to connect to the moon & the sun, to build a home with our hands, to nourish our bodies, to learn lost skills & old traditions. I recently saw some memes that showed some blueprints for homes in the 1970s when people had conversation pits, before we all got so disconnected. It made me laugh & it reminded me that that’s what we are here for - so I will do my best to explain how we are creating a life here in Portugal that is off grid & connected to nature, the highs & the lows & hopefully it can inspire someone who is thinking about making the move to a more natural life

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Our beautiful Willow, a rescue pup we have had since 2018. Stories about her to follow.

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