Pueblos abandados

Ardbol started on 14 March with a first meeting with Liselotte after a week there was an other woman, Matricia, joining but within day's both already left. Leaving Maaike and me alone, back to finding new help.

In June I noticed that a woman in the meeting of climate cleanup had a foreign last name, so I asked her if she could speak Spanish. Although her parents are German and Italian and she lives in Holland she also had room in her head for speaking Spanish, amazing! Besides that she studied biomimicry and had a lot of drive and energy.

So with the new miniteam we started to have general meetings and Yasmin gathered a lot of information. She brought us into contact with a couple of people and we worked on getting the idea behind Ardbol more concrete. A first aim was to find about 10ha of land with some ruins on it.

Because of the Corona time we could not got to Spain so we mostly did work online. Doing courses, following webinars and searching land to buy. Yasmin came across an article about an empty village and that got me thinking. It would most probably be more easy to buy an empty village and then add some hectares of land to it than buy land and try to get a building permit.

After some evenings spent in searching I learned that there are about 3.000 empty villages in Spain. And that I needed to search on 'pueblos' and 'abandonados'. More evenings searching and trying to find something online, when I came across www.aldeasabandonadas.com.

I went through the long list of options, many where in the mountains, villages left empty after a mine shutdown. More were in the far south of Spain and most were in the far west above Portugal, the poorest part of Spain. As the website kept the location hidden it was quite difficult to find the right ones to visit. We wanted to be able to get there by train in one day, so I started looking in the North East part of Spain but South West enough to get into the dry zone, out of the beautiful mountains and wet coast.

I found two and Maaike sent an email but they replied with a phone number, so Yasmin called them. We could visit them both. Exciting new step on our road to our Ardbol project!

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