Benfeita An unintentional community of eco-immigrants learning how to regenerate community and environment

For some reason best known to itself, Benfeita – a relatively isolated village in the mountains of the Serra do Açor, Central Portugal – has become a magnet to ‘eco-immigrants’ from all over Europe and the rest of the world over the last decade. The community is of the default, unintentional variety. There’s nothing remotely ‘organised’ about it. We have no shared ideology, culture, dogma or rules. What unites us is the desire to live a substantially more sustainable and environmentally-friendly life as part of a real and largely autonomous community.

In October 2017, the entire community and the valleys in which we are living was decimated by the largest wildfire in Portugal’s history. It destroyed over 2,000 square kilometers of land in less than 24 hours. 22 people in these valleys lost their homes. 2 people lost their lives. The surrounding ecosystem, already degraded and impoverished by decades of rural depopulation, neglect and inappropriate monocultures of pine and eucalyptus trees, is a disaster zone.

This brought things home in a big way. It has galvanised us into more directed and concerted action, even while many are still trying to put their lives back together again. Several community initiatives have taken root. Replanting and regeneration work has begun. There is an education project for the area’s children (http://folhaverde.pt/).

Many of us share a vision of an ‘ecozone’ for these valleys. This vision, based on the unique topography and population dynamics of the area, is for the ecozone to become a recognised ‘living laboratory’ where sustainable and regenerative initiatives (individual and collective; environmental, technological and social) originating with and developed by the area’s diverse community, can be designed, evolved, trialled, studied, prototyped and disseminated within the surrounding bioregion and beyond. (We now have a community association focused on such initiatives. For more information, see https://arborbenfeita.org.)