Our Space
Our unique, hand-crafted buildings and land are available for workshops, retreats and similar events
Abrazo House
Our main building
Apartment
Independent rooms
Roundhouse
Our meditation space
Snail Cabin
Our first cob house
The Land
Edible landscaping
Manzanal
Two new ecohouses
Abrazo House
Our main building, Abrazo House, is a two-story house with 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a library, and a large main room with an open-plan kitchen. The house sleeps up to 13 people. It is available for rent as part of residential courses, workshops, retreats, etc., which fit our philosophy of holistic learning, for €15 per guest (min. €120) per night.
The kitchen & downstairs bathroom can also be used as part of non-residential learning activities; suggested donation €5 per person.
Our cob/straw bale hybrid house was built during 2008–12 with the help of hundreds of volunteers. The crescent shape of the floor plan creates a sheltered patio to the south, a form which gives the building its name — Abrazo (“embrace” in Spanish) House. Most of the wood in the house is recycled, including the main beams which came from a 100-year-old demolished building. The house uses passive solar design, with large areas of south-facing double-glazed windows; our hot water comes from solar panels, too. Winter heating comes from a wood stove that burns logs harvested from our land.
Apartment
The main house also includes a self-contained ground floor apartment, with its own independent entrance, kitchen bathroom, and exterior patio. The apartment sleeps up to 5 people in a family group. It is available for rent as part of residential activities, for €15 per guest (min. €45) per night.
The Roundhouse
The roundhouse is a small house used for classes, workshops, meditation, yoga, natural healing, meeting circles and similar activities.
For groups that wish to use the roundhouse, we ask for a donation equal to 15% of the cost for participants, which goes to support our educational work through the Abrazohouse Association.
We started building the roundhouse in May 2018, as a small, low-cost (around €30 per m2), low-impact, relatively easy building to demonstrate the techniques we’ve been developing over the years. It has a roundwood reciprocal frame structure, green roof with central skylight, and straw bale walls with cob, lime and gypsum plaster.
Snail Cabin
Snail Cabin is a small house designed as a temporary home for a couple with two small children, and for subsequent use as a guest cabin. It has stone foundations, a load-bearing cob wall, and a reciprocal frame roof of green oak. It was built in 2006-7 with mainly volunteer labour, at a cost of around €6000 in materials. It includes a kitchen, bathroom with dry composting toilet, and a pergola that provides an all-weather exterior living space.
Snail Cabin is presently in use as a residence and is not available for rental.
The Land
When we bought the land in 2005, it was pasture with just a few scattered trees. Most of the land is now in transition to a food forest that mimics the structure of native woodland, but with a diverse mix of species that produce soil fertility, food, and fuel, on different levels: main canopy trees (e.g. oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts), smaller fruit trees (e.g. apples, pears, plums, citrus), bushes (e.g. currants, blackberries), climbers (e.g. kiwis), and ground cover crops (e.g. comfrey, rhubarb). Alongside these we have raised beds for annual crops like onions, peppers and salad greens, and a small polytunnel for tomatoes. In a temperate maritime climate like ours we should be able to enjoy food from the garden every day of the year with a minimum of work.
Our diverse garden is home to a host of wildlife: from slow worms and midwife toads to hedgehogs and foxes, woodlice and bees, wrens and swallows. The land also includes a natural swimming pool, slack lines, a fire circle, and our own beehives.
The land can be used for educational activities in return for a donation equal to 15% of the cost for participants, which goes to support our educational work through the Abrazohouse Association.
In 2020, we began a project to expand our food forest. So far we have planted more than 1500 trees on about 3ha of former pasture.
El Manzanal
In 2016 we embarked on a new project to build two new eco-houses on another plot of land in the same village as Abrazo House, with the aim of attracting new residents to an area that’s been losing population steadily since the 1950s.
The houses are built in cob/straw bale/timber frame, earth sheltered to the north, with green roofs that integrate them visually and aesthetically in the natural environment. The goal is to create homes that are healthy, affordable, non-toxic, super-insulated, durable, and above all, beautiful.
These two eco-houses are presently in use as private dwellings and are not open to the public.
