First of all, Masia la Torre is a great, very inspiring project itself, and during our stay there the athmosphere and the situation helped us a lot to work on internal group processes and get further with them.
At the moment they are nine people - 8 grown-up and one child - Manuela, living in the beautiful mountains of Aragon/Teruel, north-west of Valencia. They have a house which they rent from the city council for a symbolic price - under the condition to take care of the camping site next to the building. It’s very common in this area to find houses and land for small money.
For a field you want to do agriculture on, you pay something like 3 Euros per year - the government is happy to find more people using land as population is very small. Young people between 18 and 30 are hardly found - most of them move to bigger cities.
About five years ago, only three people lived there; the project as it is now started two years ago.
The project has three main ideas -
one is living together as a community - sharing their lifes in many aspects, caring together for Manuela, the child living there. Another aspect is becoming self-sustainable step by step.
They are already on a very good way in my eyes - half the year they supply their own organic food which they grow on three fields (over the winter hardly anything grows), they have goats for milk and cheese, chicken for eggs, just some time ago they started having bees. In some distance there is an olive-tree-field owned by an old man who can’t take care of it anymore - so they help him with the trees and therefore they can have 80% of the harvest. So they even have their own olive oil.
Every week they bake their own bread (according to a recipe from the community Lakabe in Navarra) for own supply on one hand and also for selling it to customer groups in Valencia as well as in a small shop in Olba, a village nearby.
Some weeks ago they started their own supply of electricity - they installed a windmill and six solar-panels.
So altogether they get along with quite little money. They earn some with baking the bread and cakes, some of them also go to work in Valencia some days a week developped a project where they work with organic agriculture in schools and a prison, which is financed by a foundation. Just during our stay there they restructured their financial system. The new one will be that everyone gives a certain percentage of their income to the community cashier from which on one hand they buy everything they need and on other hand everyone gets the same amount of money every month - similar to the system of minimum wage.
Their third intention is to be a social centre and provide infrastructure mainly for groups of Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid to have meetings or workshops, for example. For them it’s very productive to meet in this calm, far-out place where they can’t run away from problems as they can in the city and not to be distracted by anything.
They also try to interact more with their surrounding, which is a little difficult.
Especially with the next small village - Nogueruelas. Most of the people living in the small mountain villages in this area are quite old and keep thinking and living conservative ways of life - so many are very sceptical about the people of Masia la Torre, about them living differently, not having a “normal” job, they simply don’t understand their way of life. Noone ever comes to open events at Masia la Torre - only people who already are into alternative culture. Still, the community tries to improve communication and interaction with local people - last summer, for example, they took care of Nogueruelas’ swimming pool, organizing events and theater mostly for children, which they plan to do again this year.

For us as a group our stay there was very productive.
After some days both the people from la torre and us realized that there is some strange atmosphere between us.
For one, this was a result of our very different styles of organisation - Masia la Torre already has a very stable and well working organisation structure using tools such as schedules and weekly meetings seperated into those concerning feelings, others concerning work issues. While our organisation is rather spontaneous and from the outside probably quite non-transparent. This issue turned out to be confusing, mainly for the la torre people. Another aspect which caused this uncomfourtable atmosphere was that in our group there’s a lack of common sense/intention which leads to difficulties for people from the outside to understand what the project actually intends, what it is. First the people from Masia la Torre didn’t really see us as a group being interested in their project, whilst they did see that single persons do care.
Some people from la torre have also been disappointed about our project, as their expectations didn’t match reality.
They expected that we would already practise our ideas and visions while we in fact are still looking for ways how to realize them.
So, feeling these things and getting worthful feedback we had a few internal meetings, in which we figured out some important issues - such as finding out our common intention, finding better definitions of what the projects wants to be and what it already is as well as presenting it in a more adaequat way to avoid next places developing expectations we won’t be able to furfill. We came to some conclusions about our goals and how we can reach them. As well as we reached the point where we finally realized that for the success of the project we need to find definitions and a clearer idea of how open we want to be as a group - so we maybe no longer accept someone to join who doesn’t agree in the projects’ ideas and values or simply doesn’t want to contribute in a productive way. (Although it’s a little bit hard for many of us to create this hierarchy where some people are allowed to decide what or who is “good” for the project and what/who not, and to even not allow people to join. But finally it was obvious that there’s the need for it.)
But our stay has not only had this difficult site, we also had lots of great experience - we had good exchange with the people as well as fun and nice conversation including language troubles and finding ways how to communicate elseways.
We helped with some tasks (like building a stone wall, repairing the outside wall of the oven, collecting goat manure) and learned about baking bread, we had a workshop about non-violent communication and another one about the renewal of the Kyoto-protocol in Kopenhagen in 2009. Oh, and not to forget the nice new-years-eve we spent together - including some games using the language barrier as a tool for communication and the spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at twelve o’clock - one for each bell ringing which should bring luck.