ardbol

It was in May that our friend Dorien asked us if she could organize a poetry festival. We didn’t have to think about that: of course she could! We were happy to do something for Dorien, for all the help we get from her. And wow how nice is that: a festival in Bárcena! The festival was to take place on the 14 th of September. In the summer we already met some of the artists, who were there to get inspiration. And of course the organization who was preparing the festival. Unfortunately the 14 th of September was not during a children’s holiday in the Netherlands, so Maaike went on her own and without a car that was a bit of a challenge. We will spent a small blog about the journey to Bárcena without a car. I arrived on the 12 th of September, so I was able to see all the last preparation, which was already quite fun! On the 13 th there already was a sort of teaser for the festival, with images shown on the walls from light...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...