Abrazo House is an educational project located in the Aras Valley, Voto, Cantabria, northern Spain. Visitors have come from all over the world to this tiny village in northern Spain, to learn about ecology, health, mindfulness, and sustainability, in theory and especially in practice. We aim to develop the whole person in all their aspects: practical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. We believe that human beings can learn to live on the Earth in ways that restore nature instead of doing more damage. But it’s a long journey on which we’ve only taken the first few steps. Every day we realize how much there still is to learn. Our project began back in 2006 with the construction of a small house, Snail Cabin, then our two-story main house, using mostly natural materials (like wood, stone, straw, and mud) and with the help of hundreds of volunteers. We also began converting our two acres of pasture into a diverse, productive food forest. Since then the project has grown to include two more ecological houses in the same village, as well as a roundhouse that we use for meditation, yoga and natural healing. Behind the Abrazo House project there is a philosophy. We like to call it ecological design, though it has had many other names and our methods have been practiced by many other people (famous or anonymous) since time immemorial. We would define it as the art and science of working with nature. Some of its main elements could be summarised as follows:
• Keep it simple. The simplest solution is usually the best. We don’t like to rely on complex designs and machinery.
• Money is not wealth. True wealth lies in health, happiness, good relationships, life’s diversity, and meaningful activity, not in money. It is true that you do need some money in order to live — but a lot less than you might think.
• Slow and steady. It’s better to go slowly in the right direction than quickly in the wrong direction.
• Work with what you’ve got. There’s no point in trying to be pure in an impure world.