Eco-Building and Permaculture: Current Experiences in Coronavirus Stricken Spain

In this interview, our aim is to analyze some real life initiatives to build and live in a better world in order enrich the theoretical analysis of alternatives to capitalism. One of these alternatives is called permaculture. And one of these practical initiatives in full swing, now, in slowly recovering COVID-stricken Spain. His leader, Hermes Salamanca Román.

Hermes Salamanca Román is aware of the fact that capitalism is a system based on the limitless exploitation of limited resources, which but puts us all dangerously closer to the next health and environmental crisis. He firmly believes that another economic system is possible, and by experimenting hands-on on lifestyles based on alternative farming and house building principles, he wants not to just to talk the talk, but to walk the walk.

He lives in Portillo, a village in the province of Valladolid, Spain. He has spent 4 years building a house by himself with mud, straw and wood. He has decided to have a self sustained life, actively practising permaculture and organic farming principles in his fields around his house. Coming from the world of computer programming, he has had to learn about a whole range of knowledge fields, ranging from both conventional as well as permacultural architecture, physics, thermodynamics, waste management, to biology, horticulture, weather forecasting, water recycling, topography, hunting, animal feeding, harvesting…

He has recently began living in that house. After no one believed in his project, he is emerging as sort of an icon in the region, as he has taken his next vital step: teaching others about his success, by giving workshops, lectures, classes, interviews…

He was kind enough to receive us in his eco-friendly house in order to conduct this interview, the final result of which was more than three hours of recorded audio. Our purpose was to follow a strict documentary rigor when transcribing and it, but it has not always been possible to have the permission of the persons mentioned to quote them by their surnames. We would like to mention that the original audio document, in Spanish, is available to anyone who needs it.

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Ángel Carlos Cerrato Covaleda: We are interested in hearing about your experience of building and living in a house made of biomaterials, which in this case are basically mud, straw and wood. Tell us a little about yourself and how this project of building and living in such a house came about.

Hermes Salamanca Román: I was born in the Canary Islands 40 years ago, and when I was 6, we came to live here. When I was 19, I went to work in Menorca. Since then, I have seldom not spent less than six month periods abroad. I have lived in different villages in Valladolid province, in Valladolid city, in Almería and in Madrid, as well as in England and in Holland. I studied computer science. Since I was a child, hacker movies made me think that this was my life, the topic of solving problems or finding a solution that in principle did not exist, was something that would catch my eye.

I started working as a network and computer security administrator, which was what I had studied and majored in, but life in an office eventually lost all meaning for me and my job environment was not satisfactory, locked up in an office all day. The only incentive was waiting for Friday to come and travel and walk mountain routes. That made life more bearable. Little by little, I changed my field of study within computing, and I ended up giving classes because I realized that what I liked was dealing with people. After 7 years teaching classes, computing, and specializing on the Internet, all that ceased to be what it was when I was 18: a free space for the exchange of opinions, of information, of ideas. It became the monopoly that Google has turned it into, a brutal invasion of privacy and intimacy, so I found myself in the situation of teaching things and advising not to do them, like teaching how to upload photos and sharing all your information in the cloud.

That's when I decided to leave computing and start a new life. Since the most beautiful thing I had were my trips to the countryside on Fridays, I imagined that the most beautiful thing would be a life based on traveling. I spent a few years thinking about what my life would be like based on traveling in a caravan around the world, a nomadic life, or simply around Spain; you can spend years traveling around Spain and never see it all. But that plan never came to fruition, because traveling around the world in a caravan requires having a significant amount of money. After more than 7 years, I finally found that what I liked was no longer to travel to nature or the countryside, but to live in the countryside. I happened to see a documentary about a family that lived in the countryside in a self-sufficient and independent way, in complete and continuous contact with nature. So I thought about developing a plan that would allow me to live that way, in a comfortable and self-sustainable way, and from there I started to investigate a little bit on different ways to make my plan come true.

I learned about permaculture, which is a compendium of sciences, disciplines or knowledge that lead man to live in a sustainable, independent environment, generating and maintaining their own energy in nature in a respectful way, without generating waste, living in a conscious way because you are aware of everything that is behind what you do. When you wash the dishes, you know what is going to happen to that water, because you are responsible for recycling that water; it is not worth throwing oil on the sink and having the city council water treatment plant take care of it. Within permaculture, there are ways to build buildings consciously thinking about the materials you are going to use, being respectful of nature, being healthier for the environment; permaculture teaches you how to build a house or a farm with the natural original materials you find in the environment.

Permaculture also deals with soil management, including horticulture, fruit growing, the management of farm animals that are healthy and can be fed from the soil, and on the other hand, it deals with water recycling, or the use of energy from the sun and the wind. The most important thing is that all the elements based on permaculture have to have their connections. The elements are handled in a holistic way.

For example, a chicken coop and a garden separately have a certain productivity rate, but if we link them to each other, that is, if the garden is fed with the manure from the chicken coop and the hen house is fed with the leftovers from the garden, then those two elements have a double connection that makes them way more productive. The sum of those elements put together renders greater results than their separate results. This house, for example, is connected to the garden, the garden to the hen house, the hen house connects to the house, the house is me. The animals that I have and that you can see protect the hen house and the garden from the outside predators. I have a bird of prey, an eagle, with which I hunt wild prey in a natural way, and it is connected to the hen house because it defends the hens from the outside birds of prey when I am not there, and it warns the dogs when people come from far away because it has a view that the dogs do not have.

They are such interconnected elements that in the end we have what, in architecture, you would call: a functional design. The most important thing about design is its ability to work, and this is achieved by creating interconnections between all the elements. It is about taking advantage of the shadows that a hen house gives you to put a garden, taking advantage of the garden so that the chickens, the dogs or even the wild birds, which are almost all granivorous or insectivorous, can eat. If you have wild birds, it is almost certain that they will keep the pests away from of the fruit trees, which are dominated by the little sparrows. Maintaining a layer of wild vegetation also favours a greater biodiversity of insects. So, if you have an aphid infestation, it's only a matter of days before the aphid's predator appears.

In the end, the elements generated by man based on permaculture plus the elements provided by nature itself end up making an ecosystem that is self-sustainable, self-managing and hardly needs the working hand of man. By not tilling or digging the gardens, a biodiversity of microorganisms is maintained in the subsoil, where the roots of plants that have already died become the nutrients of the roots of future plants. It is about creating an interspecies symbiosis between my species, those of the field and the microorganisms in order to function in a way that permaculture has not invented; what permaculture does is to observe patterns that occur in nature and manage them in a sustainable way, because nature is not managed by anyone and it works like a charm. Imitating those patterns for one's own benefit is the philosophy. It is letting nature do what it has been doing for thousands of years -there is nothing invented here- and it is simply giving it a utility to live for and from nature.

Is this knowledge of permaculture and this holistic conception of the use of agriculture something you already had when you started your house building project?

Well, I started reading books and information that was on the Internet, but after a few months I was lucky enough to meet two people: Javier Lozano Nogales, and Aitor Unanue Mateo, two people who came from Galicia to here, exactly to La Aldea de San Miguel, in the province of Valladolid, near here, to build a henhouse with straw alpacas, which was my idea of how I wanted to build my house. I had thought of learning how to build straw houses by attending a workshop in Ávila, but when I was given the opportunity to work as a volunteer building that hen house, I learned all the ins and outs of building with straw. I went then on a tour around Galicia and Cantabria, learning about examples of farms that were already working with the philosophy of permaculture and met Ramón in Asturias, and a lot of very interesting people, and they all gave me the key concepts of this philosophy. As for the technical details, I learned by reading books, watching videos. Books about permaculture, but also about recovering soils degraded by mining, about nitrogen-fixing plants that recover soils, I learned about the wild plant species that are born in our province, about the geology of these soils, to understand how nature works and thrives so that, based on this natural evolution, and shortening the time, I can have my little forest of food. That hen house was made by a friend, Marina Frutos de Diego, who set up an organic chicken farm.

He did it with these materials - straw, mud and wood. My house is the same as the hen house in terms of materials: they are ecological and cheaper than those in conventional construction, apart from the ease of building with straw, which is greater than building with brick, and the health of the builder, as it is healthier to work with mud than with cement or chemical paints.

You have a brick house in Portillo, which belongs to your family. How did you take that first step and how did your immediate environment react: family, friends and the people in the village?

As I accumulated knowledge, I filled out notebooks, made summaries, I gave solutions to all the problems and challenges I would encounter. Once I gave solutions to all those problems, all I had to do was to carry them out.

Everyone's reaction, including mine, when you talk about a straw house, is to think about the problem of fire, or how to prevent the straw from rotting due to humidity, but when you acquire the necessary information, then you see how the problem of fire is solved, how to prevent the straw from rotting due to humidity, how to prevent the walls from getting wet with the rain that can tear them down...you see that it is viable and you go from thinking that this thing you are investigating is crazy to thinking that not doing it is crazy. In other words, to continue living in a brick house while being able to make it out of straw is crazy, to spend money on diesel to heat a 40 m2 apartment, when you can heat it with four sticks that you find in a field... in other words, when you acquire certain information, there is no turning back.

Of course, this requires hours of study, research, surfing the internet and then traveling to see these people at work, but there is nothing you cannot learn when the motivation is right. As children we learn things we don't want to learn, and we learn them. You don't have to be especially smart or especially hardworking or especially consistent; those values are given to you by motivation. There is another way of dealing with work when the motivation is great. I surprised people in my environment, well, and myself, when I saw that everything was working much better even than I had predicted. Once I gathered all the information and filled all those notebooks, I had to find a plot of land. It is necessary that it has a proper orientation, to see if it has protection against the winter winds is important, for example. This plot that I found is a ravine; it is open to the southeast, it has complete exposure to the sun, but at the same time it has protection from the wind on the sides and behind, which on one hand makes it easier to grow vegetables because the excess wind dehydrates the plants and therefore you need less water, and on the other hand it helps the thermal efficiency of the house, as it is protected from cold winds.

Well, this plot is not very big, it measures 2300 m2, and that's why no element is too far from the house, and it is close to the village. I was thinking about looking for a plot in the north of Spain, where there is more rainfall, or I even thought about going back down to the Canary Islands, which is my homeland, because of its climate, because there is no ice there and you can grow fruit and vegetables all year round, but here in Portillo I know all the people and they all know me. The best resource is not money, but people, and they have given me an endless number of materials because they liked what I was doing and they wanted to collaborate and help me, certainly a large part of the people have collaborated, they have helped me with the transport of heavy materials; they wanted to help me to see how far I was able to go, there are those who have given me the tanks to store the water, the material for the hen house or quite a few materials for the house... counting gifts and help I have received quite a lot of support.

Were there those who tried to take your mind off your idea or who called you crazy or something?

There were also those who jokingly told me that I was crazy, especially when I had to put the heavy roof over the thatched walls, they would say that it was going to fall down. There was that practical joke, on the part of the children, of calling me First Little Pig. They shouted it at me from behind the corners and ran away, which I found quite amusing. Actually, the real moral of the Three Little Pigs story is not that you don't make a house out of straw, but that you don't let a pig make one for you. Make it yourself, make it out of straw, and you will have a healthy home, an efficient home, a home that respects nature, and a home that if it falls down hundreds of years down the road, all the materials will be reabsorbed by nature, not a single element will be left that will not become a nutrient and will not enter the circle of life again.

Where did you get your materials?

Building with these materials is very easy, my previous experience as a bricklayer was only the collaboration building Marina's hen house in La Aldea de San Miguel, and with that I was able to build. People came, for example, to help me apply the mud on the straw wall, and sometimes there had never seen a trowel, and yet they had no problem learning, it took them only a few minutes to learn and from there on it's all but getting to work. I was very motivated to see that it was much easier than I had thought, all my doubts about the weight of the roof, for example, about the centres of gravity, all that was very simple.

The principle of environmentalism is to try to provide yourself with materials that are close to you. I got some straw from a farmer in the village of San Miguel. As for the clay, this village, Portillo, is very rich in pottery, and I was given a whole trailer of pure clay, which mixed with the soil and sand from the pine forest around, allowed me to make mortars with an impeccable finish. I had to buy the wood for the roof beams from a wood company in Valladolid. The house has many reused elements. The door is made of window leaves that I found. I used stones and filling elements I found in the pine forest... because, unfortunately, it is not difficult to walk and find areas with debris in the pine forest. The interior part has quite a lot of recycled material, such as the coat racks, embedded in the walls, which are the handles of the wine jars. The electrical switches and mechanisms are old mechanisms from houses in ruins that have fallen down or have been demolished; I have friends who are builders and they demolish houses or restore ruins, so they bring them to me and I restore them.

What were the phases of house construction and what materials did you use in each phase?

Once you had the plot, the first phase was to create the design. I did it with a satellite photo of my plot, and with my computer I located the different elements and generating connection nodes between the elements, attending to the distances, attending to the times that you take to go to those places. Also, as the plot has many areas of microclimates, like full shade under pine trees, semi-shade under almond trees, areas of continuous sun exposure… it took me several months to prepare everything: the fruit trees, the orchards, the animals, the tool sheds.

I also based my work on the geography of the land, which makes a small slope from north to south, and a valley from east to west, a valley formed geologically by the runoff of water that has been going on there for thousands of years. In order to avoid this runoff, to prevent the water from eroding and carrying away the soil, what I did was to trace some contour lines and then plow trenches on those lines; this is what is called a key line in regenerative agriculture, which consists of ensuring that the water remains on the land as long as possible within the plot, so as to prevent it from entering from the north and going down south in a single day, which is what happened until I began to modify the shape of the soil a little.

A study was also made of the ecological level in which the area was located. This level can be measured according to the plants that are born in a piece of land. Nature is an evolution that begins in the mother stone breaking with the lichens, and ends in the climate of the forest or jungle; from the stone to the jungle there is a logical evolution where plants intervene in each stage. We saw the level in that ecological evolution in which the plot was and what tools I could use to advance the plot ecologically so that the jungle stage would take less time to arrive, adding what it lacks and in anticipation of what nature gives in the next 200 years, to be able to give it in the following two months. The most important strategy for this was to make, as I said, the ditches to favor water retention and to introduce wild species to make the soil evolve, enrich the subsoil and pad the bare soil to prevent the sun and wind from dehydrating that soil. You can see, especially in spring, how the quantity and quality of the vegetation on my plot is higher than on the neighboring plots.

Nutrient-demanding plants, such as the Solanaceae family, have already been present in my plot since the second year, while it will most likely take years for this family of plants to arrive down the slope.

I bought the plot in the fall of 2014. There I started with the ditches and the addition of the new wild plant species, I spent the whole autumn and winter with these tasks and in the spring of 2015, I started to dig the foundations and fill them with stones. In August 2015, I started to build the walls. Of course, in order to build the straw walls, you have to wait for the farmer to harvest, which is in the middle of June if the year is good. I started the foundations with a hoe and a shovel, but halfway through the foundation a friend offered to do it with his backhoe for free. It is the only construction process where a machine has been involved.

From then on, the straw needs no machinery, the only thing you have to do to the alpaca is to divide it in half from time to time in order to kill the joint, as you would do with bricks. I made the decision from the first moment to work the wood of the house with a manual tool; I felt much more comfortable being able to do things when I wanted to, without the need to depend on gasoline, on generators, and as it really is not such a big effort to cut by saw, I felt strengthened by the fact that I did it manually, I felt very calm by the fact that my work was silent, without machinery that would stun the head, and that I used healthy materials, natural materials. I had several friends who helped me to build the thatched walls. Once the walls were up and I had pre-compressed the walls a little, I gradually started to build the roof structure, by sawing, with a meter, with a battery screwdriver, and without finding complications that would lead me not to know how to continue. That part is quite simple.

As for the foundations, I filled them with stone. There I found myself with the dilemma of either spending €1000 or €2000 on a concrete slab, as the canons require, or simply using all the stone on the plot and the surroundings. I had the option of either spending money and having it made by some bricklayers or having it made in stone myself. When it comes to finishing times, although the concrete foundations can be made in three days, if you count the drying time, you need a month and a half or two.

It took me 3 weeks to finish the foundation making it out of stone at no cost because I made the foundation with a wheelbarrow. The alpaca has to be lifted off the ground, obviously. It can't be near the ground because it can suck water by capillarity. Then the subflooring was done with gravel sacks placed in two rows as if they were trenches, with one row on top of another row, and on top of those two rows of gravel sacks you can put the alpaca that is already about 40 centimeters off the ground and is safe from water that can rise by capillarity

The pre-frames of the holes, doors and sales, were made with a saw, hammers and spikes. There was no problem with hitting, I did it with a hammer, but when I couldn't hit, I used a battery screwdriver.

What problems can you have with hitting?

It can happen that you miss a blow and break a board. It's practically the only problem you can have in a house, because the roof structure is not going to weaken just because you hammer it.

Then you're in August 2015.

It took three weeks to fill in the stone foundation, and in one short weekend we erected the walls. It really took one day, but the next day there were some parts that I removed and put back. In my case, I had the help of five friends. While one person divided up the alpacas, another person took care of the food, the barbecues, two people passed the alpacas to me, and I mounted the alpacas on the walls. And another person took pictures. More than just going to work, it was like we were spending an afternoon with friends. The alpaca does require prior knowledge of handling, though, mostly because of the comfort purposes.

An alpaca is an element that weighs about 35 or 40 kilos, and there is a difference between holding it well or holding it badly, as this can lead you to get very tired or not tired at all. It's a question of technique: take the ropes of a certain size and lean the alpacas on your knee to lift them up to the wall. The good thing about working with alpacas is, when you have to make a scaffolding to work the roof, with two alpacas side by side, you throw a plank and you have a scaffolding done. In the end, the alpaca is an element of the construction and it is an element for the construction, because the scaffolding is made of straw, when you go up and down to the roof many times because you can make some stairs around the house, which takes a moment and you avoid going around in a normal construction.

Well, then you make the walls. It's time for the roof.

The straw construction has to have good, what is termed, boots, separating the alpaca from the ground, but it also has to have a good, what is termed hat. In order for the rain not to threaten the mud walls and the straw inside, eaves of more than 50 centimetres are usually placed around the whole house to prevent the rain water from punishing the walls. Once we protect the mud and straw from rainwater and water that may rise by capillarity, we have the mud and straw guaranteed. The construction of the roof itself was simple and quite cheap, because except for the beams, which I bought new, the rest of the roof is second hand material. On the roof, there is a thatched chamber 20 centimeters thick because as far as the efficiency of a house is concerned, the losses are in the roof and in the holes, which are windows and doors.

If we understand the house as a 5-wall room, that is, the four walls and the roof, which is another surface of exposure to the elements, it is logical that just as protected as the walls are, the roof must be protected. There is no point in making a house out of alpaca and then putting in a sandwich panel roof, because we are going to die with cold. So this house has alpacas on the walls and both the floor and the roof have 20-centimeter chambers filled with compressed straw. Both the insulating materials and the structure of the chamber were very cheap because much of it was waste and recyclable material.

How long did the roof take you?

The roof took me no more than two or three weeks, because it was already mid-September and the rains were coming, so it was very urgent to finish the structure. I spent a couple of days laying the beams, a couple of days working on the board, a day working on the thatch chamber, and another two days working on the sheet metal. Between ten and fifteen days maximum.

What about the knowledge needed to lay the beams?
I learned that building Marina's hen house. The structure of my beams, both the ones that go from one end of the roof to the other, and the eaves that come out on the sides, are made just as they were in the hen house. The structure of the beams was something that kind of scared me. I had no previous experience and so I decided to limit myself to what I knew, which was that it had to be beautiful, because a roof with a wooden beam and a wooden board at the bottom will look beautiful, and it couldn't be complicated, and of course it had to be cheap. I put into practice in September and October the knowledge I had acquired in August.

You didn't have any unexpected setbacks?

I have this anecdote putting the beams in. When I had to place the two end beams, those two beams had to be made into a square. In order for you to know that you have a perfect square, you must measure the two diagonals of that square: if they coincide, the square is well made. Well, they didn't match, there was one that was quite a few centimeters away from the other. I measured, the beams were perfectly parallel, the heads of the beams were perfectly aligned with a string that I had put on it... but the diagonals didn't come out, and that was because one of the beams was about 10 centimeters too long. I would come down from the roof, draw a picture of it, and say: if we have two perfectly parallel lines and both of them start off perfectly the same, how can this diagonal not fit? And it was because one was 10 centimetres too long.

After taking the problem to paper, I realized that the only circumstance that could give me that error was that one beam could not be the same size: if this is aligned, and this is parallel, the only solution is that one must be longer than the other. When I went upstairs and checked that the prediction I had made was true... not only because I had solved the problem, but because I had predicted the solution... what an impressive satisfaction! And such satisfaction you find very often, you surprise yourself of how capable we human beings are.

I was also caught by the autumn rains, but I already had the beams in place. Of course, this is a straw house, so every time you finish the workday, you put some tarps on it to avoid the danger of rain, despite the weather forecast predicting no rainfall. It´s easy to always put some tarpaulins on it, just in case. Yes, there were days when I came back to find some impressive rafts of water on the tarps, but it was not a problem at all.

I built the door with some window leaves whose whereabouts a man who has a farm next door told me about. I went to get them with the idea of using them for a greenhouse or some nearby construction, but when I saw that they were windows with Climalit glass, the good kind, I said to myself: no. So I measured, I thought, I thought, and I found a way to make a glass door, which is how I wanted it, in order to favor the entrance of the sun in winter, so that the house could be bioclimatic.

The window in the living room, which faces south, I bought from a friend who had had it in his attic for years, but it was a window just out of the woodwork, it was assembled wood with no nails or anything, neither hardware nor glass. It was unnailed, so I cut it, put the glass in, bought and screwed the hardware, bought, cut and put the reeds in the glass. The rest of the windows I bought ready-made.

As I was not in a hurry, I spent quite a lot of time on the Internet on second-hand sales websites to see if I could find the measurements I was interested in, second-hand, wooden. Time went by and I did not find the ideal windows for my house, so I had to order them. I was lucky that I found a company here close by and after negotiating a little with them, they made me some unbeatable windows in terms of thermal efficiency, with triple rubber reed, Climalit glass and quite cheap, the truth must be said.

Tell us about windows and doors, please.

I built the door with some window leaves whose whereabouts a man who has a farm next door told me about. I went to get them with the idea of using them for a greenhouse or some nearby construction, but when I saw that they were windows with Climalit glass, the good kind, I said to myself: no! I measured, I thought on and on, and I eventually found a way to make a glass door, which is how I wanted it, in order to favor the entrance of the sun shine in winter so that the house could be bioclimatic.

The window in the living room, which faces south, I bought from a friend who had had it in his attic for years, but it was a window just out of the woodwork. It was unnailed, so I cut it, put the glass in, bought and screwed the hardware, bought, cut and put the reeds in the glass. The rest of the windows I bought ready-made. As I was not in a hurry, I spent quite a lot of time on the internet on second-hand sales pages, to see if I could find the measurements I was interested in, second-hand, wooden (...) time went by and I did not find the ideal windows, and I had to order them. I was lucky that I found a company here close by and after negotiating a little with them they made me some unbeatable windows in terms of thermal efficiency, with triple rubber reed, Climalit glass and quite cheap, honestly.

Tell us about the interior habitability.

Before that, we have to explain that you have to apply mud to the alpacas, which are naked. Giving mud to the alpacas is the most powerful task that a house of these characteristics has. If you have the skill, you can lift the house and put the roof on in a month and a half, but then comes the mud, which, because of the characteristics of the clay, which is very sticky, and because it has to contain a lot of straw, is not a material that can be made by machine. The mixer does not mix the clay, it ends up all piled up on the shovels, so the solution is to do it by hand with a hoe or by trampling the mud. A bathtub or a large raft is made where the aggregates are poured - the clay, the soil and or the sand - the water is poured and a person is put inside and steps with his bare feet on that material until it gets mixed little by little.

That is the part of the process of the work that has taken me the longest. I spent a year giving mud. I also divided myself into other tasks, advancing in the planting of trees, the formation of orchards. When I bought the plot, I already knew everything I had to do, but I had to do it at a viable and comfortable pace because there was an immense workload from beginning to end. So, if in applying the mud, which no matter how much you hurry, you will be doing it for months, I had dedicated myself only to that eight hours a day, instead of a year I would have dedicated three, four months… but I would have ended up crazy. If you have a strong team, you can apply it to a house five times bigger than mine in a month.

When you talk about a house like yours, what are its measures?

Internal measurements are 7.70 m2 by 5 m2. The internal measurements vary from the external, because as the walls are made with alpaca, you end up with walls of about 70, 80 cm. wide. If you add to that the eaves of the roof, you find that you have about 70 meters of roof and about 38 meters of house; it is almost double.

How high is the house?

The height when you work with straw is a little variable, because the roof puts pressure on the alpacas; then the most normal thing is that each wall loses 10% of its height. The tallest wall was 3 meters high and it ended up in measuring 2.60 meters high, and the back part barely reaches 2 meters high, so it would be more or less 75 m2 of surface and that's the surface I applied mud to: 75 meters inside and 75 outside. As I said, I worked when I could. One morning I made a couple of mud baths and spent an afternoon and the next morning applying it. I had some help. It's slow because you don't use concrete mixers or mechanical mixers, you have to do it by hand, which can be a problem, but it's nice to put several people in a bathtub and stomp on it while the straw is being incorporated.

As these are not standard materials, you have to work with the local soil and the aggregates you have, and you have to find an ideal recipe for the final gloss finish and for the properties that the mortar itself must have. For example, you have to apply onto the alpaca three types of mortar. The first is a primer, because the mud has trouble holding onto the straw, so the first coat has to be a very sticky mixture which is laid by applying enough force to get that mixture into the alpaca and in turn it must serve as a support for the subsequent coats.

Once we have given it that first coat of primer, the filler coat comes, whose property is that it has to be sticky to hold on to the previous coat, and it has to be very rich in straw because it is the coat with which we are going to correct the imperfections of the alpaca - or vice versa, to mark those imperfections -; what we want is for the alpaca to be highlighted on the wall. It is with this mortar that we are going to model the house, make the window frames, the soffits... and this is the layer that can take us the longest, depending on the thickness we want to give it, of course. It can be from 5 to 30 or 40 cm. thick.

It is necessary to consider that, mainly in the interior of the house, the more mud we apply, the more thermal inertia and more comfort we´ll get. Once with that layer applied, we can already apply what is called the shine, which is the final layer, free of straw. It cannot be cracked; it is the most demanding mortar of all because it is the one that is going to be seen, and it has to be resistant to erosion, so when we touch it, it does not stain our clothes.

This type of mixture, as it is non-standard, is usually done the following way. If we have clay or very clayey soil, we make some tests on the wall itself with one part of soil, and another of fine sand, then we make another test with one part of sand and two of soil, two of soil and two of sand... we make several different mixtures, let them dry and then we check those tests that have been made to see which one of them meets the conditions we want. Knowing how the clay behaves, how the sand behaves, how the silt behaves, we can establish that the most certain thing is that the test will be made of four parts of soil, one of clay and one of sand.

Once the conclusion is reached as to which is the good mixture, the two or three layers of shine layer are given. That part is usually done with tools: a shovel, a trowel, because that layer is intended to be smooth, without handmarks... that is what the wall will look like. When people who do not know these subjects see it, they are really surprised at how smooth and perfect the finish is without using any industrial element. Exploring the books that lead you to the knowledge of how sand works and how clay works, doing the tests and making your own recipe with your own soil is a beautiful, intense journey and gives you a lot of satisfaction.

What about those tests you tested on the wall? Does that come off later?

No, the shine layer is very thin, about two millimeters wide. You make a bucket of about 50 liters and it can be applied in a day to practically the whole house, it´s usually two or three layers, and also over those tests we did so they get buried. In these tests we can see that whether you have added too much sand, because when you pass your finger over, it is a material that comes loose, or when you pass your hand, you stain it with dust because it doesn't have enough clay to provide hardness. However, if we have fallen short of sand, we find a mortar that cracks. If it has little silt in it, it also cracks. You have to find the balance.

It's good to read books and watch documentaries and then do our tests, because the ground I'm walking on here may have nothing to do with what you're walking on if you go down 100 metres down the slope, and if you go up there, the same thing might happen. There are natural improvers in the mud, to which they add resistance, such as cooked flour, or milk protein in the form of milk powder, linseed oil...these are materials that are added to the last layer of the mortar to make it more resistant to erosion or weathering in general.

And then finally comes the paint. There are ecological paints, which would fulfill the essential premise that a wall of straw must have the breathability of the steam because the straw that remains inside the mud must breathe. If we were to plaster it with cement, a material that does not breathe, it would end up rotting.

In my case, I decided to do the paintings naturally. I made paint from clay, with natural or purchased pigments, or I dared to make my own pigments with decoction from the roots of certain plants and, as with the last mortar, applying natural improvers, which are the same: linseed oil, cooked flour or milk protein, which is casein, because animal proteins are what they are, they are chains that join particles. This protein that keeps the body's particles together, the organic matter, will keep the mortar particles together. Starch is also used, although it is little known. In other words, the water we have left over from cooking the rice or from cooking the pasta can be used to make paints or the last layer of mortar, because it is awesome when it comes to improving a clay or a paint.

Let me only mention to you that the first parts of the Great Wall of China, which were made 3000 thousand years ago with mud, were mud walls made with rice water, and those tapial of mud are still there after thousands of years under the rain. I've never seen it mentioned in bio-construction books. I don't know if other people have discovered it on their own. I would be surprised if I were the only one, because by evolutionary convergence, several people in the same situation usually reach similar conclusions. The only thing is that I started using it from the middle of the work onward, when I became aware of it. I still have to apply the part of the exterior shine layer of the house, and that is where this contribution of hardness is most necessary and I will be able to use it more.

Very well, you decide that the time comes when you want to start living and you have to put the most necessary parts, such as the water intake for the kitchen, the bathroom… I see you have a solar panel...tell us a little about all that, please.

Yes, let me talk about the calculations of the energy needs and the water needs. I took a look at the Spanish meteorological history and more specifically at that of the province of Valladolid in order to calculate an average annual rainfall, and based on that average and on my water needs, I determined the dimensions of the roof, which is where I collect the water. I needed 12000 liters of water and if an annual average of 400 milliliters falls here, then I knew I needed a 70 m2 roof. The issue of water supply is one of the simplest ones. By capturing the water with the roof, the only thing that is needed afterwards are tanks to store it. These 1000-litre tanks you can see were given to me as a gift, and they are intended for food use, so the water does not turn green.

As for my energy needs, I calculated my electricity taking into account that high-powered elements, such as glass-ceramic or electric ovens, are not available for this type of home; not because it is not possible, but because powering an electric or a glass-ceramic oven requires extreme photovoltaic equipment. So it is much better to cook or bake with fire or with the energy from the sun. What is left, as a refrigerator or a microwave, require low powers, and the photovoltaic needs are very basic. I've been running for a year and a half on a car battery that I bought from a junkyard for 25 euros. As for the rest of the equipment, it is a 260-watt plate. I still don't have a fridge, and when I do, I'll probably have to buy some slightly better batteries, but I'm really going to spend on batteries what I usually spent on two electricity bills when I lived in my flat: about 100, 120 euros for a 1.60 metre tall fridge.

This is just a place where one or two people live who make intelligent use of that fridge: if at night you fill the fridge with hot water bottles, you will most likely run out of batteries that night. You have to be quite foresighted and take into account all the factors that are going to affect your energy needs. As for the electrical mechanisms, plugs and switches, I got old, ceramic switches and plugs that were in the houses 50 years ago. I got them for free because all I had to do was to restore them, removing layers of paint that they brought, and make new ones from the chunks of the old ones.

The efficiency of a construction made with these materials is impossible to achieve otherwise. For a house made of bricks to reach the same thermal efficiency, you would have to put maybe a meter of cork in between the walls. These two elements, the straw and the mud, are very important when it comes to thermal efficiency, when it comes to keeping the heat in winter and the coolness in summer. The straw prevents the internal temperature from being affected by the external temperature, and the mud that covers the walls inside the house works like a thermal battery, it charges up with heat when there is a heat source, and starts to provide that heat after the heat source, such as a stove or the sun coming in through the Windows, stops working. It is the mud that starts to provide the heat after I turn off the stove after two or three hours on in the harshest part of the winter.

The stove should not be turned on when it is cold, but there is a timetable: it is turned on one hour after the sun has gone down, regardless of how it cold or hot it is, and you keep it on for two or three hours a day, regardless of how it cold or hot it is, and that is enough for the walls to accumulate the necessary heat to last all night and get up the next morning with a temperature of 23, 24 Celsius degrees, even if it has been 10 Celsius degrees below zero outside.

On the subject of plumbing, I had a friend who offered to do it for me, because I did him a favour and solved a problem he had. He is a plumber and he set up the whole internal plumbing thing for me. The external plumbing, that is, the water outlet, is premised on being free of waste. You have to find a way to recycle and reuse those waters. I had previously studied as a method of cultivation the patterns that occur naturally in riverbeds, rivers and streams, where there are animals, fish, insects that bring organic matter from waste into the water, that organic matter decomposes into ammonia, the ammonia is decomposed into nitrites and nitrates by various groups of bacteria and those nitrates are absorbed by the reeds and river plants. I transferred this pattern, which is in the nature of water recycling, to a small bio-filter for recycling my water. Obviously, there are some minimum requirements: chlorine must never be used, and bleach must never be used, because that would be an attack on the bacteria that purify our water.

Very important: before reaching the biofilter, we must separate fats and soaps that prevent the decomposition of organic matter. So I have a grease trap, which is an element used in any water recycling system, both municipal and private, and is very simple to build. After the grease trap, the water goes to a tank, which constantly recirculates to the biofilter, which is where the bacteria are that decompose the organic matter into nitrates and other nutrients that can be taken in by the plants, which would be the redes in a river, but instead of reeds I use plants that can be used for feeding, such as cucumbers, which I grew last year, and this year I have put in strawberry plants.

We have to capture the rainwater with the roof. That water goes through the house and gets dirty, with the dirt we feed the plants and we get clean water that will be used to water gardens and fruit trees. Nature causes this water from the gardens and fruit trees to be transferred to the sky, and it is foreseeable that the sky will make it rain on our roof again. We close the water cycle as it is done in nature, without having used any artifices or technologies other than the very patterns that exist in nature.

But then, do you scrub with soap?

Yes, yes. You have to use ecological soaps that don't have ingredients like glycerine, like bleaches, or elements that are bactericidal because we would kill the biofilter. Of course, this purification system is used for grey water. Grey water, in order to be purified, first has to separated from the fats and soaps, and from there on the purification process is based on bacteria, which decompose the organic matter into elements that can be used up by plants, as we have already said.
So that only grey water comes out of our drains, the excrements have to be thrown away. In my case, a solution that I use a lot is the dry toilet, which on the one hand helps us to make the drainage system of the houses cleaner, simpler, it is not necessary to add a septic tank that has to be emptied periodically with a vat, and on the other hand the good thing about it is that it helps the recirculation of nutrients because what it does is it composts human excreta as if it were manure from any other animal and after a period of two years of composting, that material becomes compost that you can incorporate into trees or gardens and thus complete the circle of nutrients. Over time, those nutrients return.

The dry toilet, apart from helping us a little in the construction of the house and apart from helping us in the recirculation of the nutrients, has very interesting readings: the civilized human being takes for this granted, and logically and normally makes water drinkable just to later use it to carry away the shit, in plain language, while at the same time there are a lot of people and children who die because they do not have access to drinking water… and we make water drinkable to stain it. When a person goes to the toilet he finds that he is flushing a waste product of half a litre or a litre in volume, and as soon as he flushes the toilet, that waste product is turning into five or four litres in volume. So, flushing the toilet is increasing exponentially the problem we have. The use of dry toilets, which does not involve any more complications than a normal toilet would, is very ecological and solidary at the same time.

The dry toilet consists of a chamber that in the first instance dries the excreta. These excreta have basically two problems: the presence of bacteria that can spread disease as well as odors. By drying out the excreta, we eliminate these two problems in a matter of hours: the bacteria die when they are dried out, and the excreta stop smelling when they are dried out. So the most important thing about the dry toilet is the drying material that we incorporate into it; as you use the toilet, instead of flushing, what you do is, with a pitcher, flush the drying material, which depending on the time of year will be one material or another. For example, in winter, when I have ash, I use it as a drying material, I throw it on top of the excrement, I bury it with a layer. In the summer, when I don't have ash because I don't use the stove, I make a mixture of soil and sawdust; the soil covers the excreta to prevent the odors from coming out and the sawdust absorbs the water that is left over. Once the drying chamber of the toilet is full, it is taken out to another larger chamber where it is thrown away for it to decompose for two years, and once it has decomposed, it is taken out as a black soil, which smells organic, like the substrate soil we buy in a store, a soil that is loaded with the nutrients that you once took from the very same soil. It is a question of closing the circle of water, as I said before, and the circle of nutrients. Once we have those two circles closed, nature has no choice but to prosper. If we know how to guide it to prosper in a way that produces benefits, or food basically, subsistence and prosperity is almost inevitable.

How long did it take you to get all of this? We're talking about 2016, that´s when you set up the kitchen and the bathroom, right?

In May 2016 is when I decide to move to live here, due to a series of circumstances, like having one of my dogs pregnant and about to give birth, and so that she didn't give birth in my house, we moved here so that she could get used to the new environment, with the intention of returning to my house and its comforts after a fortnight, because at that time I still didn't have any power here. But after the fortnight, and when the time came for me to return to the village, I liked the experience of being here so much that I decided not to return, assuming that I did not have the comforts of the flat, in exchange for other comforts, such as the environment that one breathes and listens to, the efficiency of the house, even when it was still under construction, the expenses of the house, which were fewer, you know? I had no power, no electricity, I had candles. All of a sudden I shook away all the comforts of the welfare state, and I decided that little by little I was going to provide those comforts to myself, based on the premise that if a person is capable of providing himself with those comforts of the welfare state and of satisfying his own needs, instead of having those needs satisfied by a state, then that system is much more solid, the system that one builds for oneself.

Possibly there are people who wonder whether this is ungraspable or utopian for them?

There is a particularity of life, especially of the human being, which is the capacity to adapt. The human being, as soon as you change his environment, in a matter of a few hours, begins to adapt to that environment. The proof is the problems that astronauts have when they leave the Earth; in a very few hours, their muscles and their bones begin to lose their functioning capacity because without gravity, they do not need it. It is a problem, but it is a real sign of the adaptation of the human being and of life in general. Human beings have adapted to living in society, they have adapted to living in comfort and to living a life that is totally alien to their own nature.

I like to compare the life of civilized man with the life of the parrot in the Loro Parque de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. We are talking about a parrot that wakes up in the morning, rides his bike around a bit, picks up balls and puts them in a basket, all to earn his food. The life of this parrot is just as derisory as the life of the human population right now. We are not meant to live like this. We evolved over thousands of years from being hunter-gatherers and living in caves and being nomads. I am not saying that this is the life we should be leading, but neither is it the life of the parrot that I was talking about.

Personally I seek the best of both, that is, without giving up modern comforts such as access to medicine or access to information. The Internet, if properly managed, is wonderful because you can learn almost anything you want, you just browse the information, you read it and you learn it. You can learn how to make a recipe, you can learn how to fix a bike, how to fix a car, all the information is on the Internet. Therefore, doing without that tool would be absurd, but for example I do see logic in doing without the human overcrowding that exists in cities, in having to work an immense number of hours to get a salary that is ridiculous (...) because if one works to provide one's own food, very few hours a day or a week are good enough. My way of managing my gardens, fruit trees and all that based on permaculture makes the tilling minimal, it´s just weekly tasks. I have gardens which I water twice a week, I take ten minutes each day, this is twenty minutes a week and I eat every day from them, so if that translates into money, those twenty minutes are paid for at hundreds of euros. So the fact that we really stick to what is our own nature, makes us feel what we really are.

The transition from civilized man to wild man is much simpler than it might seem. It is true that the brain has to reconfigure itself: in the city there is not a moment of silence so if we suddenly subject the brain to continuous silence, the brain freaks out and seeks the need to obtain the stimulus that it used to constantly have and that now does not have. But the reverse is also true for me now; I am used to the fact that the stimuli I obtain are natural: the song of the bird, the song of my eagle, the song of the cicadas, the sound of the wind in the leaves... if an ambulance suddenly passed by or a sound alien to nature was heard, I would be startled; it has actually already happened to me. Everything is much easier than you might think because we are ready to adapt.

There are people who might think that sounds good for someone who has already lived in a village. Portillo has around 15 hundred inhabitants in a semi-rural or rural setting. What would you say to these people, who are the majority in a country that is increasingly urbanized, but who reflect about these things and yet still don't dare take the step because they don't see it as feasible?

Well, I have lived in Madrid and London, both of which are major European cities. Human beings have a tendency to live in nature, the more urban a person's life is, the more they need to make trips to the countryside. The human being, no matter how urban he is, loves nature, feels it, and after a couple of hours in the countryside, he is like a fish that has been taken out and is reintroduced back into the water. It is true that there are some attitudes that need to be changed and that not everyone succeeds. I know of cases of people who have gone to live in the country and have had to return to the city because of a behavioural problem.

Man today is accustomed to arrive at a place and modify it at will, but in order to live in the countryside the way that I describe, you cannot modify it at will, you cannot dig where you want, without knowledge, or cut what you want, without knowledge; you have to look at nature and think what is best for nature, which in the long run will be best for us. The fact of changing the mentality is something that nature has taught me, I did not come here with this idea in my head, I came with the idea that nature was going to adapt to me...it is a very anthropocentric idea, but we have it.

Shall I tell you the story of the toad? This toad would dig up the pots in the tree nursery that I planted every year and that I would plant in the ground in the fall. During the summer, the toad would dig up my pots and bury himself in because there was wet soil in them, which is what he needed to survive and not dry out. So I found myself every day watering the nursery and seeing that the toad had pulled out the trees out of the pots. I would take the toad, pull it out, throw it on the ground, recompose my tree and finish fixing it, just to find myself next day in the same situation, and the next day, and the next day...then there came a moment when I told myself that either I came to terms with that toad, or it was going to end up breaking all the tree pots... so I said to myself: why not leave a pot for him and water it to keep the soil moist with the regularity he needs… if he has his pot watered properly, he won't need to go into the other pots. So, I came to that unspoken agreement with the toad: I got to have my little trees thriving, the toad got to have his house, and I got to have the benefits of having a toad in the garden, like him feeding on insects that can harm the garden or like enjoying the nightly croaking of toads, which is another incentive to live in the country.

I have had a similar situation with bees. The bees would come here to drink water in the driest times and would get into the drinking troughs of the chickens and the dogs, so the latter would either not drink, or would suffer from the stings of the bees. What did I have to do? Well, I had to put in watering cans for the bees so that they would not get into the watering cans of my animals. So now I have half a dozen drinkers that are for the bees, optimized for the bee to drink, with little floating cork plates so that as many bees as possible can drink from that container, and it is my daily task to keep those containers full because as soon as those drinkers run out of water, they will go back to my animals' drinkers. So in order to keep the bees here, which is undoubtedly a good thing for the pollination of both the wild plants and the ones cultivated by me, I have had to make that arrangement.

Having this humility in front of nature is essential to survive here. It's not a problem of adaptation, it's a problem of an inadequate mentality towards the environment. You know? When you move here, you have to be humble and accept failure, that is, there is one thing that human beings don't know how to do: when something goes wrong for human beings, they have the tendency to blame the wind, the rain, the heat, the cold, an animal... assume your own mistakes: when the fox gets in here and eats my chickens, it's not the fox's fault. If you blame the fox and take a shotgun and go kill foxes, that problem has been transferred to him for a few months, soon there will be foxes again, and soon they will eat your chickens again. If you do not assume your mistake, you will drag the error until you accept it or until you leave. So, humility before nature, the ability to accept mistakes, the ability to accept failure are virtues necessary to live here. The rest is given by our capacity to adapt.

Suppose there are people who say: well, with this construction model I close the cycle with nature, but I have to give up the comforts that the current constructive model offers me. What would you say?

Coming to the country is not giving up any of the comforts. It is renouncing, or rather, it is dispensing with, the noises, the acceleration of civilization, the timing in civilization; here other timing and other volumes are handled. As for comforts, I have here basically the comforts that any person can have.

Comforts like a warm home, like opening a faucet and having water come out, like plugging in a device and having electricity or like having a bathroom. In fact, I would say that life here is more comfortable than for many people in the city, because most of the year, in order to get the ingredients to cook lunch, I don't have to go to the supermarket; I simply go out to one of my gardens or I go into the pantry. For that matter, it would be even more comfortable to live this way than living in a city, where, in order to do anything, you have to either use a private vehicle or take a bus or any public transport means.

So I don't see this as a renouncing any comfort or as prostrating yourself to the countryside with the ideas we had of the countryside in the past, that the countryside is hard, that not everyone can live through that. It´s the ways in which we used to work the countryside mean that have made us reach these conclusions, but if we base our work in the countryside on the criteria used in permaculture, not only is the countryside practically self-sufficient, but it is also much more productive and, without a doubt, healthier.

You can regard this as a person's own initiative in their own land, but permaculture can be transferred to huge crops of hundreds of hectares, permaculture can be used in the balcony of an apartment, you can do permaculture almost anywhere. What you have to do is simply to be governed by the natural patterns of cultivation. There are documentaries that talk about how large companies that cultivated hundreds of hectares of cereal have decided to apply a little permaculture to these intensive crops and what they have done is to alternate cereals with vegetables and to allow fruit trees in the middle of the field with enough space for the the tractor to pass through and while planting the best climbing species that climb the fruit trees that provide fruit, climbing species such as kiwi or species such as vines, which are also climbing.

When a traditional agricultural model has been transformed into permaculture, not only much healthier products have been obtained, but the production of that land has multiplied. No longer only the cereal is harvested; now the cereal is harvested, the fruits of the trees are harvested and the fruits of the climbing trees are harvested. With the alternation of the cereal, fruit and climbing crops, neither is affected by the other because they do not coincide in time, or are made not to coincide in time. There is no competition of irrigation between trees and grasses, like cereals, because as the tree tops are much higher than the cereal spikes, so the roots are also at different depths… so not only there is no competition, but the cereal takes advantage of water that the fruit tree is not going to take advantage of and the fruit tree takes advantage of water at depth that is not going to be taken advantage of by the cereal.

Therefore, the permaculture model does not mean disregarding comforts, does not limit production, but multiplies it and generates much healthier food and a much more sustainable way. It avoids the use of insecticides and biocides because it maintains a biodiverse nature so that there are no pests. In order to avoid weeds there are strategies, such as sowing as you harvest, so that the still-erect stems of the grass invade the soil and do not let the weeds prosper and the only thing that prospers is the seed of the next harvest.

There are countless examples. Masanobu Fukuoka, for example, is a Japanese man who grows rice without flooding the rice paddies, simply because paddies are flooded not because the rice needs the flooding; but because that is a way of fighting the weeds, the so-called weeds, since only the rice can grow in the flooding. What Fukuoka did was, instead of flooding the rice paddies, two weeks before the rice harvest he would plant the seed of the next harvest. When that seed was born and was at least ten centimeters high, he would harvest, but only above those ten centimeters. That way he always had the soil invaded by the species he cultivated, leaving no space for the weeds, and on the other hand, apart from alternating cereal with rice, there was always a mixture of clovers, which provided nitrogen to the soil. It neither flooded nor added biocides or nutrients: the nutrients were provided by the clover, the weeds were fought off by alternating crops, and Fukuoka's farms are the most productive rice farms in all of Japan.

The permaculture model is not only much more efficient than the traditional model, it is also healthier, more respectful of the environment and we could perfectly live in it now and move the whole current model to the permaculture model not only in terms of cultivation, but in terms of energy management: the same system that I use to purify water could be used to purify water in cities or towns, dry toilets could be installed in houses. It would only entail changing some models of action. If, instead of filling the containers of the cities with plastics and waste, which we really should not have to produce, or if we set in place composters so that people could empty their dry toilets there, we would get a much healthier model of city, with much healthier environments, because all these tons of compost, rich in nutrients that we would generate, would be thrown somewhere in nature so it would bloom with so much nutrient.

Many people can accept the fact that there are individuals in society, like you, who take on this change, but that this is not viable on a social level, that you cannot go beyond the individual´s realm of action.

This doesn't necessarily consist of everyone going to live in the countryside; it consists more in having what is currently cultivated, having the methods of cultivation that attack in a very direct way the health of the soils and the aquifers, the health of the animal population of the world, be done following the ways of permaculture cultivation so we would need many fewer hectares to cultivate because the method based on permaculture is much more productive, it doesn't rely so much on diesel, on petrochemicals and on the biocides derived from these. It would be more about changing the agricultural model, the energy model and a little education for children.

If we stop burning fossil fuels, there are more than enough models, both the known ones, such as solar energy, tidal energy, or as many other energies, that unlike wind energy, do not cause harm to wild species, as well as others, such as compressed air technology. With compressed air, any machine can be moved and there are methods to generate cost free and pollution free compressed air. You can create a plant that generates compressed air without a raw material, just by using the river beds of the rivers. There are a lot of technologies that are very subversive, but they are very buried because there is no interest in them being known.

If we could change the energy model and the agricultural model, and above all also the livestock model… 80% of the agricultural land is used to feed the meat we eat. You do not have to be a doctor to know that we adults put much more protein into our bodies than we really need, that by eating meat once a week, or every two weeks, we would live longer. What could we get? We could reduce agricultural spaces, reduce pollution, let nature flourish and let´s have a healthier environment.

Do you think this model endangers the current capitalist system or can it be found within capitalism?

Capitalism is a system of exponential and unlimited growth. We live on a finite planet. Capitalism at some point is either removed or it will collapse. You cannot live in a system based on growth when you are in a limited environment. It's a matter of time before capitalism is either removed because it ceases to be viable, or collapses, as it does every other year, with the tulip crisis of yesteryear, with the real estate bubbles... In the end, because capitalism is based on a finite resource, capitalism is finite.

Capitalism and permaculture are directly opposed, because one is based on plundering all the resources that exist, and the other is based on taking advantage of resources without destroying them. Living in a world based on permaculture while maintaining capitalism...there may be people who know more than I do and know how to carry that out, but I think that capitalism and permaculture are irreconcilable opposites. Other models have to be created that are not based on greed and on using so much, where there is a distribution of both wealth and space and where life is more ordered... It is true that as gregarious animals, part of our nature leads us to be more powerful than our fellow creatures because, just as for a wolf maintaining his leadership is a power, for a person, having a car that is worth a lot of money, a sports car, is part of that expression of power, and accumulating wealth is part of that power, but there has to be some limit somewhere and if we don't put it on ourselves, the Earth will put it on us at some point. It's not a question of whether you can or cannot. The time will come when there will be no choice left but to adopt a more consistent way of life. Either that or we will become extinct as a species.

What would you say to a person who, without necessarily agreeing with capitalism, lives inside capitalism and thinks: well, this model is all very well, but what do I live on? I can eat from my plants, but I need money.

The aim of this is not to stop being productive in society forever. By living this way, what you get is that instead of needing €2000 a month to get ahead because you have so many expenses that you can not get by with less, what you do with this system is to reduce housing, construction, maintenance and energy maintenance costs: heat, water and electricity, and on the other hand, you produce a percentage as high as possible of your food. Once we have these two problems solved, one can need about €500, €600 to live. Or maybe a person is capricious and needs €1000 because he likes to have the last mobile every two months: he can perfectly maintain a farm based on permaculture and work perfectly part-time in any job, because the work here is practically non-existent. You have seasons that maybe are a little harder, the canning season, for instance, but the planting of the gardens and all those things, you solve them in a couple of afternoons: the maintenance of the gardens needs two times, two days, a week.

It's true that, in order for us to eat all year round from the gardens, especially here in Castilla, where the gardening season lasts three or four months, you have to pull out the preserves you have made from your vegetable products and fruit during the other eight months. Fortunately or unfortunately, the food preservation is a bit out of fashion. In the past there were a lot of ways of preserving food, such as dehydrating vegetables, smoking meat, pickling...there are a lot of preserving methods that are no longer used because they are not necessary, but that does not mean that they are not there. It's a little bit about recovering the old techniques to be able to lead a healthier life. I think anyone in the world would agree to lead a life based on nature even if they had to go to the city for four days to work four hours a day to pay for the expenses they could still afford. Personally, my goal is to live on €200 a month. I spend €100 on food for my dogs, which is the biggest expense I have, but in terms of my food, my most basic needs, we are talking about less than €100 a month when I have a full pantry, and €150 when I have an empty pantry. I spend very little on my mobile phone because I make just the right calls; we must remember that when we did not have a mobile, we got by… in other words, we have gone from not having a mobile to not letting it go. An intermediate term will make us have a much lower phone bill.

That is a personal choice: what luxuries from civilization are you willing to pay for and maintain and therefore work to support? Or will you cut down on those expenses in order to stop working? There, each person has to find his own tastes. I personally am in favor of the right amount of paid work. For a person who has training or who knows how to be independent in life, getting €300 a month is quite simple. I am a computer scientist and I fix just enough computers to maintain that income. There are many ways to reduce that income in order to reduce the workload. If we have a person who can live with €200, you can not condemn that person to work 8 hours in a factory, because he will tell you to go hell, he will say: if I can get by with €200 euros a month, no one will exploit me.

Everyone who has companies and is sincere, will tell you: a person is capable of producing five, six times his salary. How can that be OK? How can it be that my work produces five, six times what I receive? I mean, wouldn't it be better to work less and receive more? How do I do it? By becoming self-employed? No. Because you're gonna get ripped off anyway. What you need to do is to cut down on expenses. You work to pay for food. Why don't you work to stock up on food? All these ideas were more than enough to get me started.

I know in a pragmatic and secure way that this is viable, that this is possible, that this is not a utopia... I acquired the certainty by watching documentaries by the Spanish National Scientific Research Council (CSIC), by reading books by agricultural engineers with a more than adequate training who explained the most productive agricultural operation in the world: forests. Why don't we cultivate and maintain the fertile soils as they are cultivated and maintained in the forests? Why do we kill the fertility of the soil and then fill it with oil-based poisons that contaminate the soil and the aquifers with those pesticides, with those petrochemicals? Here, for example, in Portillo, the aquifer is contaminated and now the water has to come from an aquifer that is about 20 kilometers from here, that is, a whole aquifer contaminated by arsenic.

In the end, either all this is changed voluntarily, or there is going to come a time when we have no choice but to change the systems of life, to move to permaculture, or to a culture that looks after nature. This is not a question of being more romantic, or more hippie, or more nature-loving. We are destroying the basis on which we are supported. When that foundation falls apart, we go behind; that is 100% certain. I don't think that there is anyone, not being those who sell petrochemicals, who is not aware that our subsistence depends on the balance of nature. There is a documentary called: The Soil in Organic Farming. Masanobu Fukuoka is another example. There are examples galore. A farm for the future is also a very instructive documentary. With these two documentaries, you don't need any more. When renown engineers such as those who are in the CSIC, who are the best agricultural engineers we have in Spain -those who have not left, those who remain there- tell you that... there is no doubt about the functionality of the system.

What is preventing it from being implemented is the vested interests of the petrochemical companies. There is nothing else that prevents this from growing, maybe not at such a purist level, but maybe at an intermediate level. An intermediate level like the one I mentioned before, of cereal lands with fruit trees. In Majorca this is being done in some lands: instead of using tractors to tillage the land, they use animal traction, they release a flock of sheep to eat the loose straw and fertilise the land, and other animals dig up the soil. In other words, they harvest, release the cattle, keep them as long as they need, and then sow again. Or just like I was saying before: sowing over the young seedlings.

There are so many strategies to get rid of pesticides and herbicides that if they are not being extensively implemented is just for those vested interests. Both the average farmer, the village farmer, who has his hectares of land, or the new farmer and is just starting being one, look at their neighbours and see they have profitability based on the subsidies of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the subsidies of the European Union. If you rely on CAP subsidies, you have to rely on their premises, which are: you have to sow this Monsanto seed; before you sow, you have to apply some Monsanto herbicides; you have to use the tractor; the tractor is going to be sold to you by John Deere; in order for yo to pay for that John Deere tractor you have to ask for a credit from Santander Bank; when you harvest, we'll put a price on the harvest; you're going to get €100 per hectare...that farmer guy has no other way out but to sow as many hectares as he can to be able to pay for the tractor, to be able to pay for the pesticides, to be able to pay for all the Monsanto seed. And in order to be able to collect the CAP subsidy, which is going to pay for all these expenses, you have to use all those herbicides, pesticides and petrochemicals to fertilize the soil, because since you are continually digging it out, you are cultivating in a desert and every time you plow, you have to use the slurry, the petrochemicals and the oil-based nutrients. Otherwise, the CAP officers won´t pay you (...).

The agricultural model is based on that, on the subsidy. If there was no subsidy, here in Castilla no cereal would be sown, other dry crops would be sown that are really profitable. In fact, year after year, people in the countryside see this very easily. You see a field of sunflowers where the sunflowers dry up and die because there's a sunflower subsidy that subsidizes the planting of sunflowers. You're not subsidized to harvest it or water it. What do people do? They plant the sunflower, they collect the subsidy and they forget about it.

A couple of years ago, the international year of the legume was celebrated. You were paid to sow fields with legumes: peas, lentils, chickpeas... you were paid to sow and we had exactly the same situation: people would sow their fields, the CAP inspector would come, he would see that it was sown or grown from peas, farmers would collect the subsidy and they would forget about the land. That agrarian model is of a stunning absurdity, there should not be a single business based on the land, subsidized. One thing is aiding the entrepreneur, which is important so that everyone can access certain sectors, and a different thins is, once you've started a business, for that business to survive, it has to be profitable. If you are being subsidised, you don't care if the business is profitable. Those are the big obstacles for a more sustainable model to prosper.

In your more immediate environment, what do people who know you do, those who are farmers, do? Do they still look at you with scepticism, especially once you already have everything?

These issues are very complicated in village environments. I know old people, horticulturists or fruit growers, who have known all their lives, and have realized, and have assumed, and have taken for granted the fact that to plough your fruit field is to kill fertility. They know this, but they still do it, because in the culture of the people, there is a saying that if you have weeds in your field, it means you have abandoned it. So they prefer to keep plowing to avoid receiving the criticism of the neighbors, rather than to continue the idea that you have discovered and that you have given as valid. Just imagine: I collect fruit from fruit trees in nearby plots because the owners don't collect it, they don't want it, but they still keep plowing. In other words, they don't plow because of the fruit, but because their neighbour reproaches them for having abandoned the plot.

We have to change our mindset, we have to change this culture so that this ends up being the normal. You don't change the mentality of a person who has seen the same thing for 50 years overnight. He can see it, he can understand it and he can believe it, but social inertia leads him to keep plowing even if it is a 3000 m2 space full of fruit trees with incredible fruit -I don't know how many the jars of jam I made last year from a single plot, a lot of kilos of fruit on the ground, and the man is only goes to his plot to plow, he juts says: “I just keep plowing, that´s enough, I don't want more”, you know? That's the culture that needs to be broken. There's a generational shift coming.

Luckily, on the one hand, the new generations are getting rid of those prejudices that existed in the past and are adopting this as a more beautiful way of doing agriculture, and on the other hand we have refuted academics who, in my particular case, come to see how organic agriculture really works, people who teach to future agricultural engineers, who come here to see my gardens, that's a good sign. They also came last year from the Forestry School. That is a clear change on the one hand from the new farmers and on the other from the new trainers of agronomists in forestry, so the change is going to come for sure.

It may seem a little alarmist, but knowing that there are interests against it, can't it sound a little too cheerful to say that it's a question of generational change, knowing that there are people who are going to see to it that it doesn't happen?

Yes, that's what I was saying at the beginning. Change is either done voluntarily by human beings or forced when the oil runs out. We've been hearing for many years that oil is running out and it's true that it will. I'm not an expert, and I don't know if it's going to run out next year or in the next 200 years, but it's going to run out. And by the time that happens, the model will have to have changed, because right now, all agriculture is driven by oil: nutrients, pesticides, biocides, industrial machinery, transport of products.

What would you say to that consumer, who says: the current model allows me to eat strawberries in winter, and it transports products to me that will never be grown in my land and I do not want to give them up now that I have known them? A consumer who is not necessarily urban; it could be a neighbour of yours, or that farmer next door who prefers to wait for the model to run out?

I like this question very much, because I have lived the situation I am going to tell you about next. Here in Megeces, a village in the province of Valladolid, close by, there is a man who five or ten years ago switched to organic farming. He grows various things organically: potatoes, carrots... an older man, a man who has known how to break down prejudices and take a step towards change. Here in my house we met once, this man I'm talking about, whose name is Juan de la Granja Tablares, and Luismi, who is the farmer from La Aldea de San Miguel who brings me the straw, and who is a conventional cereal farmer. Juan, the organic farmer, said to Luismi, the conventional farmer: "you are playing dumb. How much do you pay for potatoes grown with chemical fertilisers? 30 cents of euro, 20 cents a kilo? They pay me 90 cents, and I have a production quite similar to yours. I have no expenses for petrochemicals or biocides, and my potatoes, as they are organic, I can sell a potato this big, and I can sell a potato this small”. The conventional farmer sells a medium sized potato at a reasonable price, but the rest just goes to the purée food industry, which will pay him a cent a kilo.

I would say to the conventional farmer that he should go and talk to a farmer who has gone organic, who would tell him that he is fooling around, that he is working to get someone else to put a price on his product, spending a fortune on fuel, on machines, on petrochemicals... and who will later tell him that it is all worth 30 cents a kilo and that it is not even worth harvesting. That doesn't happen to an organic farmer; phew! An organic farmer sets his price. And if he's lucky enough, like Juan, to sell all his products to organic consumer groups, then he sells the kilo of potatoes for between €0.90 (90 cents) and €1.15, which is the supermarket price. In other words, as a consumer, I buy organic potatoes at the supermarket price, but there is no middleman: the farmer wins and we consumers win.

This is the model to be followed, and the only way to convince the conventional farmer is listening to someone who has already experienced it, who has seen the transition and is seeing the benefits, not to be burdened by the fact that the potato will go down and the harvest will not come. You can't live like that. Well, they live because of the subsidy, that is why they kowtow, let us say, because, well, they pay me only 30 cents of euro for the kilo of potatoes, but Europe gives me money to pay for the diesel, it gives me money to pay for the tractor.

As far as the consumer is concerned, this would be more difficult. In my own organic consumer group, Portillo en Transición, we have this situation: do we limit product buying practices to local and organic produce or do we continue to bring in mangoes from Andalusia? Or do we continue to bring in avocados from Andalusia? And bananas? Well, there are conflicting positions among people who have the same criteria, because… why aren't we going to eat bananas or why aren't we going to eat mangos, if they are organic, if they are grown organically? Well, basically, because if you have had to move a product 800 or 900 kilometres from Almería to here, no matter how much it is grown in an ecological way - so it is true that it is going to be healthier - if you are really environmentally aware, it has already lost its ecological capacity, because of all the fuel you have burned. I would tell that person to think about their children and the land that we are going to leave them if we don't consume an ecological and nearby product. That is fundamental. You have to think about the generations you will sell to make these decisions, because you don't do it for your health: a mango grown here is just as organic, in terms of health, as a mango grown in Andalusia. The difference is that a local organic mango is most likely going to be eaten when it has been cut from the tree, two days, a day before or even that very morning, and the properties of that fruit, which is freshly cut, are much higher than those of a mango, a banana that has been cut for a week two weeks before: the carotenes and vitamins it contains are much higher. So, if we eat an organic mango that has been cut for a week, then it is not that different from an organic mango brought from South America. It is a question of valuing yourself, valuing your offspring and making a decision that has to be personal. You have to value the pros and cons and accept or not the compromise.

It is clear that we can live with what is grown nearby, that the rest is a whim and is not necessary. Are we going to play with Earth, the land that our children will have? Well, everyone has to answer that question. Some time ago, I decided to dispense with these unnecessary whims in favour of the Earth and in favour of giving the message that it can be done. It is not only doing it, it is teaching that you can: teach your neighbour, who has an orchard in which he breaks his back all year round, teach the agronomists, teach the foresters that this model works, that it can be felt and seen.

Well, do you want to tell us which people or institutions you mentioned before come here interested in your model?

First, if you like, I will talk a little about the people who collaborated in my training. As I have already mentioned, as far as bioconstruction and permaculture in general are concerned, I was lucky enough to meet Marina de Frutos, the manager of the company: "Pollos de la Aldea", in the Village of San Miguel, the ecological chicken farm I mentioned before, who coincidentally started the construction of the chicken coop with the same technique I had planned to build my house with. She allowed me to work there as a volunteer, which is the best way to learn something, collaborating with someone who already knows how to do it, since you have the opportunity to do it and ask that person. Marina brought two bio-construction professionals, two artists, because a bio-construction professional is an artist. Not an artist in the sense of someone who is good at something, but an artist as someone who sacrifices time and work for the sake of beauty.

These people make the work for a fee, but when they finish it, they devote themselves to beautify that work for free, because they are not capable of making a square house; they have to make it beautiful, they have to make it organic, and these people are the aforementioned Aitor and Javi, both from Galicia. They are people who, apart from helping me with construction, have led me to meet other people, like Ramón, who lives in Asturias. He was important because I talked to him about the philosophy behind this, learning how to understand, knowing the beneficial consequences of actions if you work like this, or the real consequences if you don't work like this. One problem with why people accept capitalism and its ways of life is because we are not really aware of what is behind it. If people were aware of what it means to turn on a faucet, what it means to plug in a device, what it means to eat, both meat and vegetables, maybe they would have another awareness. You have to lead a more conscious and rational life to make decisions based on truth, not on a mirage. Ramón taught me all this and more.

There have also been other people, who helped me a lot in my beginnings, offering me alternatives when it comes to living, such as using the solar oven, the solar water heater, that is, taking advantage of the sun as a source of immense energy, and you can take advantage of much more than you use. The fact of cooking using the sun, that already tells you everything, especially during the fruit storage season, in summer. I have times when I cook for 7, 8 hours a day, making perhaps 30 kilos of fried tomatoes in a single day, and in doing so using the sun I save a lot of energy, apart from not lighting the stove in the house in summer, which allows me not to heat the house: the solar oven is all good, it doesn't have a single problem.

Once I started building, I had the help of many of my friends, such as Cristina Cubero and her husband Javier García, from Arrabal de Portillo, here in Valladolid province, or Patricia Cubero and her husband Ángel Muñoz, from La Aldea de San Miguel, also in Valladolid province. My friend Paco, a retired ranger from Arrabal, has also helped me a lot. César Martínez Martín also gave me a helping hand back then. There have been many people who, just because they wanted to either help, or to feel involved in such a beautiful project, or simply wanted to learn, because they have ended up here giving me a helping hand or simply collaborating, just as I also collaborated with Marina, because in the end that is the way to learn.

On the other hand, I have also given free workshops, to make up for the time people had taken to teach me; in order to continue that chain of favors. I have received people who have stayed at my house for several days, who wanted to learn how to build straw stables.
Alicia also came, a friend from Salamanca, a single mother with a life that fell apart overnight and the beauty and good thing that your life when it falls apart is that you can build it from scratch, and when you have the possibility of starting life from scratch you should at least analyze the different options to see which is the one you like best, since the previous life fell apart.

On the other hand, I usually receive visits from people who come to know about permaculture, and bioconstruction. There is an international religious community, directed by José Eizaguirre, who every year do a week of ecological transition at the University School of Agricultural Engineering of the Society of Jesus in Valladolid (INEA), and they dedicate one day of that week to visiting alternative life projects. They visit my farm, Marina's farm and her company: Pollos de la Aldea, they visit Crica, an ecological cow farm in Megeces... And look, one of those guys from Crica is also making a straw house: he visited my house when I was just starting out, he asked me all the doubts you can have when you see a straw house, and when he understood that the doubts are solved, that it's cheap, that it's healthy, that it's nice, that it's healthy for nature and for men, he decided to build a house like that, too.

As for the religious community of whom I spoke, it´s the third consecutive year that they come over, and in the previous years they commented in the INEA that the form of life that I have here had impacted them, up to such a point that the director of the INEA, Felix Revilla Grande, came over, because what I was doing went against what he was teaching, but year after year he was told that it worked, and when that man was here, he was amazed seeing my garden, which as I said, is a zero maintenance garden. That strengthens my position a lot and on the other hand it makes that man, his speech in his classes at the university, change.

The engineers from the School of Forestry in Coca, a nearby town in the province of Segovia, have also come here, and although perhaps the forestry engineers do not have a real impact on the evolution of agriculture, at the end of the day, they are the ones who manage and take care of the forests, and I am in favor of the forest being more diverse. The forest that we have here is not a forest, it is a pine forest, a pine monoculture that we romantics call a forest because we feel that we live in a forest, but it is not really a forest. The fact that I have had the opportunity to express to these people, the future foremen of farms and pastures, my way of seeing the forest, my way of seeing agriculture, surely in the future this will exert some change in the forests that surround us.

People come to do workshops because they've heard about me. Aitor tells me that people he has met in Galicia have talked to him about me as a reference in many sectors in this region of Spain. My only concern is to defend nature. To show civilization the beauty of nature by doing field trips, for instance, looking for traces of wild fauna, so that people realize that here we have an incredible wild fauna, only that we don't see it because that fauna is hidden. It is not necessary to watch a documentary on television to see wild fauna. We can see it here if we know where, when and how to bet on a place, to see the roe deer, the badger, the wild boar, the fox... The fact that more and more people know this way of doing things in the end leads to the transition process to come thanks to people who are dedicated to disseminate this knowledge and this way of doing things, instead of being imposed by the end of oil.

What I say to everyone who comes is: always talk about what you have seen here. If anyone wants to know more about this culture that is destined to save the world, let them come, I have no problem in dedicating them the time they need. If we don't take the step, we will become extinct or destroy the Earth. So, sooner or later it has to happen, it is a matter of awareness and generational change.

If someone wanted to contact you, how could they do so?

This is my e-mail address: hermes.sala@protonmail.com

There have been people who have come to the village and have asked for the boy living in the straw house and they have been escorted from the village to here; they have been told: follow me. I would like to encourage anyone who has doubts, to come, even the most skeptical skeptic, as I will be happy to receive him here. That is what I like, that they do not believe my words, but that they see this.