Welcome to Rural Escapes Portugal!
We host retreats and holidays in Portugal including yoga | 12-step | off-grid living | combined art retreats | volunteering opportunities |
Escape to the peaceful southern mountains of Portugal and join us at our rural off-grid home set in a 6-hectare valley in the mountainous region of the Serra de Monchique, Algarve. Just a 20-minute journey from the spa town of Monchique and 35 minutes from the surfing beaches of Odeceixe and Aljezur, we believe we have everything to make your holiday truly special.
What makes our place so unique?
Here you will step back into another world, where time slows right down and you can truly get away from it all, immerse yourself into life’s natural rhythm and re-connect with natures song.
This is a special place where you will experience the healing tone of nature – spending time swinging gently in a hammock in the shade of a tree or if you feel more adventurous you can explore the surrounding area at your leisure. We have no light pollution so when the night-time falls the sky awakens to a jeweled tapestry of pure, glistening beauty.
As a guest you can opt for self-catering or all-inclusive, or perhaps join one of our many retreats that include yoga, art, sound healing and massage therapies.
We especially welcome people (guests and facilitators) who are in recovery from addictions and also in 12-step recovery groups.
Off-grid living: Our venue is completely off-grid and we live here all year around. We use solar for all our electricity and we even make our own gas using a bio-gas system, which uses old food and converts it into gas and liquid fertiliser. As wonderful as it is, this can sometimes mean we don’t have hot water, especially if we have had a succession of cloudy days.
Water: All our water comes from a spring. We make the most of saving and storing water through a system of swales, ponds and a water tank. We filter all our natural spring drinking water through a charcoal filter system and encourage all our guests to bring a drinking flask and fill it up from the filter. We have 4 compost toilets onsite to keep water wastage to a minimum.
Food: Our guests enjoy a plant based diet for our guests, most of our food is either organically home grown or bought locally. We purchase our eggs from our neighbours and they are truly free-range, quite literally the happiest hens I have ever seen!
Waste: Naturally we recycle! We actively avoid using plastic and seek out products that have less impact on the environment. Many of our structures have been made using the natural resources from the land including trees and mud. All our food waste is kept for our biogas system and the natural fertiliser bi-product is used for the trees and crops.
Laundry: We wash bedding once per week! Yes just once! Think about it … most hotels wash bedding and towels once per day and it pains us to think of all that unnecessary waste and cost to the environment.
Impact: Being off-grid we naturally have less impact on the planet. Solar energy heats our water and powers up our appliances including our electric bikes.
Our retreats are generally small with maximum 14 guests staying here, as we believe this lessens the impact on the natural resources. Many of our guests have said that since staying here they have made small but significant changes in their lives – the most popular has been eating less meat, opting for filtered water rather than purchasing bottled water and using less toilet paper!
We welcome teachers and facilitators from all disciplines to run their retreats here, please click here for more information.
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