In 2006 I obtained a beautiful piece of land of 1.2 hectare in the Spanish Pyrenees and from then on managed and maintained this site, building a sustainable home for myself and for hundreds of plants and thousands of animals.

In different phases  I constructed my own house with straw bales and clay, installed some ponds for grey water filtering and constructed a solar greenhouse and compost toilet. The management of the terrain consists mainly of cutting the vegetation of the grassland with a scythe and pruning or eliminating excessive growth of shrubs and trees.

After more than 10 years the results are positive and in some areas spectacular. It is possible to live a simple, low cost, sustainable and comfortable life and at the same time stimulate and enrich the flora and fauna on the terrain.

This blog is an attempt to give an account of the process after an experience of more than a decade. The former blog, which can still be visited here, was more focused on day to day events while this time the focus will be more on specific topics and their development over the years.

My own development started more than half a century ago in Holland where I was born in a little village near Amsterdam. As a student of agriculture I came to Spain in 1987 and, enchanted with the land and its people, stayed since then, first in the city of Zaragoza than moving definitively to the mountains around 2012. Besides my interest in ecology and sustainability I like photography and playing my synthesizers.

Andreas