We are looking ideally for a couple, or 2 - 3 friends and we look forward to welcoming you to our quinta. Our project is to bring back to life this beautiful old village. Set in 7 acres of amazing landscape, with a collection of charming old barns and dwellings. Deep in the countryside yet close enough to local towns to not feel isolated. Steve and Sarah are dedicated to turn this place into a wonderful place to thrive. For the past 20 years in the UK, Steve worked as an engineer, school teacher, university lecturer and motorcycle instructor so is well versed in training and working with people of all ages. Sarah worked as a therapeutic counsellor and has now switched her focus to restoration of old buildings. In addition we renovated a number of old properties. We decided to move to Portugal in 2018 and spent a year researching the many diverse regions to find the place best suited to us. Originally we planned to buy a small holding and live a more self sustaining and regenerative lifestyle. We became interested in permaculture in 2018 and our original plan went out of the window when we discovered an abandoned village in Central Portugal, with 3 hectares of land. Our small plan became much bigger! We chose to live in the Silver Coast region for many reasons. Our nearest town Leiria has a beautiful old castle, a lovely central square and many old streets to explore. It has a diverse culture of art and music and is famous for its medieval festival. The beautiful beaches of the Silver Coast are all within a 40km radius and further inland there are a number of beautiful river beaches. The scenery is diverse and there are many walking and bike riding trails nearby. Most of all we chose this region because it's simply beautiful.
We bought Chumbaria in 2019 and have lived here permanently since September 2020. As with many things our plans were affected by the pandemic, so we got stuck in the UK for much longer than expected. We have four grown up kids (27, 22, 21, 19) who sometimes live here, come over for a holiday and often to lend a helping hand. Some people think we've come here to retire but far from it!
Steve does most of the garden/farm work, and Sarah manages the restoration of the buildings - we have a total of 11 buildings. Originally Quinta da Chumbaria was a working farm/village with up to 40 people living here. The farm had both animals and agricultural output, but sadly it has been abandoned for over 50 years, so we have a lot of work ahead of us!
We have restored two of the buildings using as many natural materials, such as hempcrete, as we could to renovate them in an efficient manner, whilst keeping the overall look as close to the original village as possible.
We plan to regenerate and develop the land into a beautiful permaculture garden supplying fruit and veg to our visitors. We are also planning to create a food forest, have some beehives and a small animal sanctuary and a million and one other projects! We also hope to run permaculture courses here in the future, Steve completed his Permaculture Design Course in 2019 and is now working on his Applied Permaculture Diploma.
We would like volunteers to work for 5 hours 5 days a week in return for bed and board. We have a number of projects such as creating an edible forest garden, designing and making some art installations, making steps to join terraces, working with cob and other natural building materials, along with garden work and caring for the hens etc. Lots of fun stuff that we need help with. In return we also understand the need to chill and relax and this is a great place to do just that. We are starting to put together gong bath days, music evenings and workshops for a variety of things. There is a good bus and train service from nearby Pombal so travel to Lisbon or Porto is straightforward. We are also not adverse to driving volunteers into Leiria for the evening or to visit the markets. Although we have everything here that we need, so often there's few good reasons to leave our little piece of Paradise! We will also provide bicycles and appropriate safety gear.
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Organic methods: Almost all of our seeds come from Bio-dynamic organic seed producers. We are now making our own compost but started out with good clean horse manure and organic shop bought compost. We never use chemical fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides (dogs flea collars aside!) We employ permaculture principles and have learnt a lot from the likes of Charles Dowding, Geoff Lawton etc...
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Learning opportunities
Vegetable farming
Poultry farming
Forestry
Flower farming
Aromatic or medicinal plants, teas
Seed saving or production
Vegetable or fruit preservation
Green Building
Mechanics / tools / technology
Methods or systems
Biological pest control
Holistic management
No-till farming
Permaculture
Host type
Self-sufficiency property
3
Hectares
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7.4
Acres
