COMMUNITY
DESCRIPTION
Amoraleza sits on 4.35 hectares of land, in the mountains above the towns of Órgiva and Lanjarón, in Granada, Andalusia, Spain. It borders the Sierra Nevada Natural Park and is 45 minutes south of Granada and 30 minutes from the Mediterranean sea. Besides a stone house, which is used by the administrative team as an office, all dwellings are low-impact. The accommodation is in yurts and cabins. During the warmer months, there are bell tents for the volunteers. Many visitors and volunteers also choose to camp.
We are completely off-grid and our energy source is solar. There is a good mobile phone and internet connection, but we choose not to use Wi-Fi. Water in Andalusia is a precious resource and we are fortunate to receive our water from the Rio Lanjarón, which reaches us through a system of acequias (water channels), reservoirs and pipes. We have a natural swimming pool and a spring which runs when there is enough rain. In drier years, we get our drinking water from the nearby town of Lanjarón, famous for its water. We have a shared outdoor kitchen and a large geodesic dome which we use as a workshop and ceremony space.
Since the community was established in 2006, we have experimented with many different ways of living together. We are a family with 4 children and over the years have shared with many friends, visitors, volunteers, and both short and long-term community members. We are open to welcome other long-term and permanent members with a similar vision of health, nutrition, spirituality and respect for nature. We would especially like to share with other families dedicated to the work with sacred plants.
We are working on generating abundance for the community, by offering retreats and providing accommodation and meals to visitors. We run retreats between April and September and during this time welcome many volunteers and visitors. Our average community group size is 12 people and we offer an opportunity to experiment with group dynamics through the creation of temporary community. During the colder months, there are few organized activities and there are usually only a few people in the community helping to do renovation work, harvest the olives and care for the land.
We are vegetarians, non-smokers and do not smoke marijuana, use drugs or alcohol.
Over the years, we have acquired a lot of theoretical and practical knowledge about living a low-impact lifestyle, especially about eco-building, nutrition, local plants and wild foods. We love to exchange knowledge, music and laughter with the many people who stay with us during the year.
We value direct and genuine relationships between people and prefer to spend time connecting with each other rather than becoming too absorbed in virtual relationships via computers and mobile phones. While we understand that these technologies are necessary for work, study and research, we invite people staying on the land to make moderate and limited use of them in order to live as much as possible in the present moment.
There is also the broader community, known as the Amoraleza family, which is made up of friends and former retreat participants and volunteers who are scattered around the globe and continue to support us from afar. We are grateful to all the people who have helped Amoraleza become what it is today and dream of one day creating more communities with the same ethos in different parts of the world.