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Up until now, we've always fetched water from the nearby village of Lences. There are two points there where we can tap water, and it tastes great. But it's not practical to keep going to the village, especially since it's not enough to water 120 trees. So, high on our backlog (to-do list) was setting up a water supply. We have a permit to draw 10 cubic meters of water from the river, which is sufficient for now. Eventually, we want to recycle all the water we use.  Step one is getting water into the village. Since the river is about 10 meters lower than the village, we laid 600 meters of pipe in the river last holiday. The idea was to use the principle of communicating vessels to get water up to the village without a pump. I've done this many times before, so I thought it would be a simple task, but no matter what we did, the water didn't come out during the last holiday. That was incredibly frustrating, so the first thing we did when we arrived was to continue wor

We are looking forward to our next vacation in August. We have a substantial list of things we can do and are now busy preparing everything for it.  We have made a list of all the things we need to prepare based on this list of things we want to do: WC/shower hut - an outdoor space made of clay and stone as a toilet and shower Creating paths - many walking paths are difficult to traverse and need to be cleared Building a clay wall - to practice, we want to build a clay wall Building a stone wall - to practice, we want to build a stone wall Making stairs - there needs to be a staircase to get from the container to the romantic forest Planting trees - there are 120 Paulownia trees that need to be planted Connecting solar panels - we want to have 10 solar panels on the container and another 8 by our house Building a room - in the main house and our house, we can build a room Making an outdoor kitchen - along the container, an outdoor kitchen needs to be made Clearing stones - ga

The first time we went to this area was a little bit further to the north, during the summer holidays of 2021. We wanted to visit Araia, because Tibor figured out that we could reach it in one day by train. We were planning to do that in May 2020 when Covid threw our plans in the water. What we knew then, to be able to reach it in one day, we needed to walk from Hendaye station to Irun station (so from France to Spain), about a 30 minutes walk. That first time we found out that there was also a metro like train running from Hendaye to Irun and San Sebastian. Now we didn’t buy an abandoned village close to Araia, but a little further south. The closest station is 30 km from Bárcena, that is not reachable in one day by public transport from the Netherlands, because trains only stop there 3 times a day.  It  is possible to reach Miranda de Ebro or maybe even better, go to  Vitoria / Gasteiz, because you can rent a car there. These are the steps you have to take to get there by train (from

After the long journey , we placed the boxes in the container. Ready to be unpacked. Because I found it quite exciting, I waited for Maaike to do it together. I've done quite a bit with electricity before, but this was definitely more than I've ever done. We consulted the documentation and got to work, first checking if we had received everything listed on the packing list. That was quite a search, two things turned out to be missing. After texting, it turned out that they had already been incorporated into another device. From the off-grid center, we received two schematic drawings. We consulted them and tried to place all parts on the ground first. This seems easy with a schematic but was more challenging than expected. The colors of the diagram did not match the wires, moreover, there were labeled cables that we didn't need. Lastly, what was confusing was that the batteries did not need to be connected and that an extra fuse was provided for the generator that was not sh

Before we are going to write about setting up our first power plant, there is one more blog that’s been on the shelf for a while. In spring 2022 Maaike’s family had a reunion, family being all aunts and uncles and cousins from fathers side. At that time our idea of buying Bárcena was still very fresh, but the idea was born so off course we talked about it. Cousin Joep, who works at The Hague University and the department of energy transition, was very interested in the project and said at his work they were always looking for projects for students and ours might be a good candidate.   In the year that followed we stayed in contact and when it became more and more certain that in September the village would be ours, we agreed to do a minor on the university on our project. The project being: what do we need to make the village have power all year long this off grid. So in September 2023 we had a meeting with four students who were going to work on the project. Therefore Tibor made a des

Last week Martijn Ballemans, his wife Zoë and their children visited us in Bárcena. They are traveling with their camper to get inspiration for where they want to live. They were in the neighborhood and stayed one night in Bárcena. Our first visitors stayed the night! It was very nice to meet them there and to hear what they think about the place. To discuss things about the future food forest.  We celebrated Trisa’s birthday,  Martijn helped with setting up the electricity and Zoë made a soup from the nettles in the villages. The first meal made from Bárcena products! And it tasted very good. Now that Martijn visited Bárcena, it is really time we write about the food forest design. In October 2023 Maaike started a course “Design course for food forest and edible garden” with Martijn Ballemans from PuurPermacultuur . It was a 7 day course where we would learn how to design a food forest. About the first half of the course consisted mainly of learning about what a food forest is and get