Hill of Almatret, Aragon, November 2012



We could not wait any longer to go and start working on the land. For that we needed to get a car that would take us there and back, as well as arrange all the camping stuff. After a week, everything was done and we were ready to go!
We had the blessing of having our first friend from England come and stay with us, Katie. She reminded us of our lives in Brighton, of our friendship circle and helped us so much during this time. She lifted our moods, made us coffee every morning and did an amazing job constantly sharing the dream with us! Not to mention the amount of heavy duty work she did too!
On the first day we set up camping at the bottom of the hill, it was great having all our tents together around the fire, at night time it was, well there are no words to describe it, just seeing all of the stars shining so brightly, and each others faces illuminated by the moon light.
The next day, we got our working gear ready to make a path from where the car was parked up the hill to where the old ruin is. It took us the whole day, picking up weeds, rosemary bushes, cutting branches out of head height, clearing rocks and leveling the earth path.
On the next day clearing the ruin was our task, this took us nearly a week to see the floor of the room once this was done, the top of the walls needed to the cleared and leveled. 

At the same time we did the ruin, Katie and Greg build our first compost toilet, which has an incredible view of the whole valley. Every time one of us would have to use the toilet, we would inevitably come back saying, it is the view I have ever seen while sitting on the loo. 

Our next task was to select, prepare and carry back to the ruin five wooden beams, each one four meters or longer. That was hard! But we did it!  We are very proud to say that we did not cut down any trees, all the ones we found had already been downed by natural causes, the hard part was to carry them all the way back, up and down the hills in very precarious situations until we got them to a safe storage space next to the ruin. 

After a couple of weeks the weather at the end of November beginning of December started to hit hard, and temperatures starting dropping. It was great to cook every meal over the fire, not using gas, but as winter came, every morning we would wake up with ice inside as well as outside of our tents, are water bottles were frozen, the washing up liquid was frozen and even our eggs!

After another week in that condition we decided to head back to Zaragoza and wait till we are ready to build a better shelter for us and for the weather to get warmer.