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A Place to Stay

Our main focus is to build a food forest. We already have 120 trees planted, but to truly start working on it, we need to live there. To stay in the village, we need a house. However, building a house requires help from others, and they also need a place to stay. Meanwhile, for us to build the house, we too need somewhere to stay. And so, we find ourselves caught in a cycle. To address this, we first decided to camp out and create some basic facilities: a simple kitchen, a room to stay in, and a dry toilet. We made use of the large house for this. While the house doesn’t have a 100% waterproof roof, most of the rain runs off, with only a little seeping inside. The first room we built was on the second floor of the four-story building. This room stayed dry even during rain. We constructed a new floor and added a door, which proved to be a blessing. While we were camping, some of us came down with a stomach flu, and it was comforting to sleep on a mattress near the toilet. On the first...
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Media attention this summer

Of course there was some media attention this summer. Silvia of the Diario the Burgos came as one of the first, when she heard that Rick, Mirthe and Vos were in Bárcena she wanted to interview them. diariodeburgos Halfway during the 4 weeks unexpectedly the journal of the Castil & Leon came to have an interview and we had a two minute item on the news that day! At the end of the four weeks it was busy: Karlijn form BNR news radio came. She is making podcast about empty rural Spain. bnr The guys from the YouTube chanel Monxileros  came to make a podcast. They came together with Elvira. They made a very nice movie of the village and the Ardbol project. Monxileros   And on the last day the newspaper El Mundo came. It is nice we have the attention as one of our goals is to spread the optimism and the idea of a better world. It sometimes is also funny when there are multiple cars in the village and the journalist start interviewing each other.  Here you can read how d...
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Planting Paulownias

Finally we could start planting the trees! Well almost, because first we needed the excavator. the delivery came a few days after we arrived in Bárcena so that was quite in time. The truck driver stopped and asked, how are you going to get the excavator from the truck. And we were like ' what ', you are the delivery man, you tell us. But he didn't have anything to do it with, so we needed a plan B. First we thought, maybe run the truck backwards against a higher part and searched for that. But then Maaike thought: "there's somebody working at the mine, they have a lot of big machines, maybe they can help" So we went there and immediately Diego who was working there came to the rescue in his big tractor. And with some ropes they managed to get the machine off of the truck! First we did some try out holes, before we went on the quest of digging 120 holes. When we started doing that we soon found out that digging the holes 1.5 meters deep, as Carlos said we...
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Never alone in an abandoned village

One might expect that being in an abandoned village will be lonely. But a part from Carlos and all the people who we knew were going to visit us, everyday there were people visiting the village. let's start with the people we knew were going to visit us in order of appearance.   Mirthe, Rick and Vos who came visiting with their camper to find out if they want to live in Bárcena and to help us some days. They are now in the process of preparing to move to Bárcena so it seems that the answer is yes!     Maaike's Brother Teun, his wife Marieke and daughter Sarah , who were there for 2 weeks and took a lot of trips with the kids and cooked for us almost every day! But most important: they really liked being there, so hopefully they will come often when we live there.      As an ultra runner Teun explored the area by running and cycling. For example he explored routes to Lences and found three different ones. Tibor's daughter Fiona , who helped a lot with ...
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Water Flow is Crucial

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...
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Todo

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 ...
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Travelling by Train

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 ...
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