Who are we ?

Idealists, dreamers, travellers and dynamics, our moves lead us to Tenerife (Canaries Islands) more than 5 years ago. We live for nature, an outdoor daily life, a way of life we like and which makes sense, we strive for starting to build the world of today and tomorrow, the one in which we believe, where the Earth and all its beings are respected. The principle of the permaculture are our motto: to take care of the Earth, to take care of the people and to share.

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Pascal loves the Earth. To plant trees, recreate an ecosystem inspired by the living things and make a pleasant place to live is his passion. Béné has always relevant ideas in mind, and try to reconcile in her projects the reality of the current society with her believes in a fairer, more beautiful and simpler world. Little Luna, with her 3 years of live, marvels every day at the little things like the geckos sticked to the walls, the tree frogs croaking at dusk, the fruits growing on our land, the bare feet on the dirt, the chickens...

The search for an involvement in our daily work

In 2013 we decide to rent a big house on the main square of our adoption village, Los Silos, to open a guest house.

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In this old classified house, important heritage of the village, our “Casa la Ranita” takes live. Travellers come from all over the world to spend a time at our place, far from the overcrowded beaches and mass tourism of the island. We aim to offer a good quality welcome, based on conviviality, consciousness, ecology and simplicity. Beautiful meetings have been numerous for 4 years now!

Our project

More than two years ago, after a long research in our Northern island little village, we bought a piece of land to start a permaculture project. The place is idyllic, at the foot of Teno Rural Park. Now we just need to bring it back to life by planting trees because, except an ancient avocado tree, the land is nearly bare.

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The lower land around ours is filled with bananas-plants, bananas-plants and more bananas-plants plantation. It's pretty and green, but it's a green desert. Fortunately, the Teno Rural Park surround us, and we are a bunch of conscious people to think different, to resist against the banana wave financed by European Union in the aim to restore the biodiversity. The potential is high and the climate allows to plant a wide range of plants (fruit a nut trees, spices, aromatics…).

The work on the land is going on step by step. Amongst other things, we have to build an irrigation network to able the little trees to launch. Plantations go along the seasons and favourable moon. So far, we've planted around 100 trees.

The educational side

As we're not only focused on trees, we've launched on the land a project of an alternative kinder garden for children from 2 till 6 years old.

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The idea is to give to the children a way to grow at their own rhythm, free, in a quiet and natural environment, and to accompany the development of everyone instead of imposing them our structure and aspiration. We're inspired by pedagogical methods such as Montessori, Waldorf or Reggio-Emilia. Currently we're having 4 children coming every week day morning.

The goal of our crowfunding project

To keep going on with the project, we wish to buy the other half of the land (about 3.000 square meters) and a little house (60 square meters) situated at the foot of the land. To plant more trees, off course, but to avoid that this piece of land comes back to intensive agriculture as an extension of the bananas-plants plantations . This would damage our project and the effort we've made to restore the land.

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Moreover the house will give us the possibility to host volunteers, artisans and travellers sharing our aspirations to create a greener, prettier and conscientious world. Thanks to the rent of the accommodation, we can wrap everything up and find the necessary funds to the continuous development of the project (plantation, varied infrastructures, functioning of the school, hosting of volunteers, workshops…) while travellers will enjoy “conscientious” holidays in an involved project.

The importance of your donation

We already have 85 % of the capital needed to make the buying. Although we're quite reluctant to depends on a bank, we've tried to obtain a loan for this 15% missing. The absurdity of the current bureaucracy led us to an agreement... then a refusal. What a pity! We were so close to a final solution. But this bad surprise has been for us a good opportunity to think differently, to free us from financial institutions and to rely on the support of citizens like us, conscious people with the will to make the world better. This is why we think about this participating financing and we cross our fingers to make it work thanks to your support!

More info about our projects:

> Facebook page of the project

> the website of the alternative school : http://escuelitanatura.blogspot.com.es/

> the website of our guest house : www.casalaranita.org

> the Facebook page of Casa la Ranita

Une forêt comestible et pédagogique à Tenerife