We promote our first rural project of Cooperative Housing in right of use! At the initiative of the seed group el Turró s – Common House, more than a year ago we detected a rustic farm of 240.000 m2, of which 40.000 are cultivated and the rest forest. It is located in Argelaguer (La Garrotxa, Girona), and inside you can find a main farmhouse plus two buildings, with a useful constructed area of ​​880 m2. It is part of the Catalog of Farmhouses and Rural Houses on non-developable land, susceptible to reconstruction or rehabilitation. 

After assessing the feasibility of the project, in març of 2020 we signed up with the property, and the last Ordinary General Assembly of Sostre Cívic, last Friday July 2, we approved the purchase and start of the housing project of El Turrós. The total price of the operation is €360.000, and it has been possible thanks to the financing of the Cooperative of financial services Coop57. The initial share capital contributed by each person will be €15.000, and the usage fees (approximate) will be €285 per month. 

Right now the project will begin the architectural studies prior to the adaptation and rehabilitation works, in order to be able to request the current licensesponentto start construction at the beginning of 2022.

A driving group with a long history of community life

The main building is in good condition and only needs minor rehabilitation, and will be used as housing. Currently in use, it is a building with a main floor and a second floor, with 9 rooms and common spaces: a hall, a kitchen with a fireplace and oven, a very large dining room, and 4 complete bathrooms, in addition to the washing machine and all the ground floor, which will be used as warehouses, pantry and workshops. The project, as designed by the driving group, is organized by individual people who form a single unit of coexistence. It does not consider private spaces that are complete homes (the main building does not currently allow this), so a community life is proposed with private rooms of different sizes, but with common spaces (bathrooms, kitchen, dining room, storage, etc.) for everyone

The driving group is intergenerational, it was created in 2017 and currently consists of nine adults and one baby. They share a long history of friendship, coexistence and work, working for the revitalization and promotion of alternative and cooperative economy practices in La Garrotxa. The group is currently closed, but we hope in the future to be able to invest in the two buildings apart from the Masia (where no action will be taken at the moment) to use them to locate more homes.

A comprehensive project of rural life and production

The project wants to go beyond residential use. It is posed as a integral project, which takes as a model the close interrelationship of the productive and reproductive life of the peasantry's ways of life, taking advantage of the available spaces to generate human wealth and

material With this aim, the group wants to take advantage of the characteristics of the estate ofEl Turrós to propose a comprehensive project for rural life, turning it into the nexus between housing initiatives, agroecology and circular economy.

That is why the project also includes the "Common Tools" initiative, which will stimulate the creation of collective workshops for different food and artisanal products produced on the same farm and by the same members of the cooperative. In the words of the driving group itself, "we want to cover most of our vital needs within this cooperative social and economic framework in an almost circular way".

Soon this will be the only project in the rural environment of Sostre Cívic, and also the only one that contemplates one gestió integral of a rustic farm, at an agricultural and forestry level. In this sense, the Turró project will be "an entire field", as defined by the driving group itself, "of practical experimentation of the cooperative housing model in right of use to the rural environment".