Foreword by Ian Thompson, Editor
When I envision an eco village, this is exactly what comes to mind: a community of like-minded people reshaping their entire lives around sustainable living.
The divide between eco-village living and the majority of common housing schemes nowadays seems vast, if not worlds apart. Personally, I am designing a future where I aim to live off-grid, grow a significant proportion of my own food, and live in harmony with the trees and space around me. But would I live in an eco-village? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. The only potential downside for me is that I truly value my privacy away from work, and these close-knit communities may not allow for that. This is only my perception, and may be far from reality.
However, I think we should also consider that we seem to have lost the art of building communities. We used to walk along the footpath to our local store, walk to school, or queue for a bus. As a test, I asked some colleagues if they knew their neighbours and their names. I wasn’t surprised to learn that many didn’t really know.
Why is this? Is it the fault of our urban planners? Is it because everything seems to centre around our phones now? Or have we just lost the art and desire to live in a small community?
Alegria Eco Village Visit: Video Transcript.
Costa Rica’s lush rainforest, biodiversity of plant species, and endless sunshine provide the perfect conditions for humans to live mindfully off the land. Today, we’re at Alegria Eco Village in the hills of San Mateo, Costa Rica, exploring what a community-driven regenerative future looks like and getting to know the people who are making it happen.
Located about an hour from the country’s capital of San Jose, Alegria Eco Village is a haven for those seeking to live a self-sufficient, mindful, and regenerative life while also ensuring that their impact is as minimal, yet as beneficial to the surrounding environment as possible. Founded in 2019, Allegri Village was created by co-founder Stephen Brooks as a sister site to his other two eco-villages in Costa Rica: Punta Mona on the Caribbean coast and La Coviera next door.
We had the chance to meet Stephen inside Alegria’s stunning yoga Shella. He told us more about how the village started and his hopes for his future. “From a very young age, I just questioned everything. I started thinking about who is the designer of this place? Things just kind of happened around us, you know, food systems, medical systems, governance. It’s kind of crazy. Who’s the designer behind it, and do we have any say in this design? I kind of decided from a young age that I think we do. I think we really can shift things.”
Like Punta Mona and La Ecovia, what similarly allows Alegria to thrive is its capacity for regenerative living in its food system, community values, and building practices. “My big aha moment was when I witnessed a playground full of indigenous children get sprayed by a Chiquita banana crop duster here in Costa Rica. I was here on vacation and it totally rocked my world. How can we be doing this? These beautiful indigenous people treat the earth like an extension of their bodies and here we are spraying them with neurotoxic chemicals so we can have cheap, flawless looking bananas. How can we live in a world like this?”
“Often people don’t know that there’s alternatives. At the same time, people also just look the other way. When I first moved here, we started bringing groups of students down, high school and college students from around the world, to show them how beautiful and magical Costa Rica was but also the reality of the rainforest destruction and the cultural decimation of indigenous people and the agricultural hell that was just destroying all harmony. With that, I first started Punta Mona which is on the Caribbean side near the Panama border. People can come and experience something different, really experience something on the physical side where we physically designed it differently: where our food came from, our water, our electricity, how we built our buildings.”
“Punta Mona just became this collection of plants that I would travel and collect cool plants and plant them there and then spread them to people that visited. That’s been a mission of ours. After many years, I knew that we needed to do more. My parents were getting older, I wanted to have children, so I started thinking what would a larger community look like? Also, in a replicable model where we can start doing this around. Right up the street from here is called Lycovia which we started in 2006. It took many years. We put together a team and now there’s 45 families that live there from 22 countries. The parents co-created a school that’s called Casasula which has like 50 or 60 children in it.”
“Four years ago we started Allegria Village. The goal was to keep spreading this. What lessons did we learn from Ikovia? What lessons did we learn from Takata? I think the most profound thing about it is it’s like who are your neighbors and why? How can we get more intentional? We don’t want this kind of monocultured community where everybody’s the same. Like I said, there are people from 36 countries. I don’t know how many religions and languages are spoken. People are very different yet at their core we want to surround ourselves with people with similar values. People that really care about the earth and the ecosystems around us and the watersheds and where their food comes from and where their water comes from and the footprint that we leave collectively.”
Alegria’s eco village community garden holds everything from bananas to papayas, mangoes, Goa beans, and so much more. But our favourite plant of all is the Shampoo Ginger plant used by indigenous people for thousands of years to clean both body and hair. Kiera got to try it out for herself and we love the smell of it. As the community continues to grow, its goal is to virtually eliminate a reliance on outside products as well as trade with other local businesses and communities as often as possible. We can’t wait to see the sheer size and output of the food forest in only a few years’ time.
One of Alegria’s core pillars is its dedication to finding ways to support the surrounding community well beyond just providing jobs. The Alegria Eco Village team has set up a non-profit organization committed to finding strategies to accomplish this essential mission. 98.5% of Costa Rica’s energy comes from renewable sources including hydropower, geothermal, wind, biomass, and solar power which supply Allegra’s power needs. But residents are also incentivized to purchase their own solar panels if they wish to be completely self-sufficient. Water also comes from two wells and three springs located on the property, providing extremely clean water for all residents.
In the shared spaces around the property, including the Hive and the yoga Shalla, the open-air design was created to ensure mindful connection with one’s surroundings while also constructing spaces that offered collaborative opportunities for work, reflection, and fun for individuals and families alike. Whether you’re looking to move to an entirely new place or simply want to make where you’re currently living more sustainable, a lot can be learned from the values, community, and regenerative living at Alegria Eco Village.
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