What Happened When a Dozen Community Hubs Met for a Weekend in Spain

A closed-door weekend with the people who run Europe's community houses, and why their stuck points, money, power, and belonging, are everyone's stuck points.

What this essay argues

A report from a closed-door gathering of the people who run a dozen of Europe's community houses, on the money, power, and belonging problems they all turn out to share.

FROM THE FIELD

From the field. This essay draws on the New Camino weekend at Casa Tilo, a multi-community gathering of community-house stewards.

The essay

On a closed-door weekend with the people who run Europe's community houses, and why their stuck points are everyone's stuck points.

Last weekend I drove to a villa near Barcelona to sit in a room with about a dozen people who do the same strange job I spend my life studying. They run community houses. Co-living places, retreat centres, residencies, a network or two. Most of them spend every week building belonging for other people, and almost none of them take the time to rest and connect with others doing the same.

That was the quiet thing underneath the whole gathering. These are people who work pretty much all the time. They host, they cook, they hold the difficult conversation at 11pm, they make sure the new person feels safe by Tuesday. And they rarely stop to compare notes with anyone carrying the same weight. The weekend at Casa Tilo was convened, in plain terms, so a group of hosts could finally be the guests for once. Get to know each other. Say out loud what is hard. See if they want to help each other going forward.

The conveners framed it as a "New Camino." The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage path stitched together from guesthouses and trails. The idea was that something similar is forming across Europe right now, a loose chain of community hubs that guests already move between, and that the people running those houses barely know one another.

Here is what struck me first. When you put a dozen of these founders in a room and ask them what they are doing this for, the answers are not about real estate or business models. The opening session asked exactly that, why are you doing this, and what came back was alienation. People are lonely. People want to belong somewhere. People sense the institutions they grew up trusting are not holding, and they want to build a working prototype of something else before it is too late. Health authorities have started calling loneliness a public-health problem. These are the people who quit their jobs to do something about it with their own hands, and the first thing they needed last weekend was to not feel alone in the work.

So that is the frame. A dozen houses, one shared ache. What I want to tell you about is what happened when the conversation moved past why and into how. Because the how is where it got specific, and where I think it stops being a story about communes and starts being a story about you and me, and all of us.

Paying for something that resists being priced

The longest, most honest session was about money. Not theory. Numbers.

What became clear fast is that none of these places pays for itself the way a business does, and each one has invented a different patch.

At Maysou A Noste, a co-living house and village café in the French Pyrenees, four people bought the building together and none of them draws a salary. Lucile, one of the founders, described a food budget of about five euros a meal and rooms that run from twenty to under forty euros a night. People pay somewhere between six hundred and a bit more than a thousand a month. It works because the owners chose it as a life, not a job, and because the village around them already had a culture of doing things together.

At the Life Itself residency near Bergerac, Valerie Duvauchelle said the quiet part directly. The place runs at a deficit. It is covered by an associated software company, and the goal is not profit, it is to reach roughly eight thousand euros a month so it breaks even. They own the building, so there is no debt eating them alive, and that is the only reason the math survives.

At Casa Tilo, the venue we were sitting in, Richard Bartlett raised about fifty thousand euros to start the place with a single tweet asking to borrow it. The money was committed within half a day. Then he hit the part nobody warns you about. A three-month season is easy to sell, come for the summer, it will be wonderful, then it ends, and it ran near full. A permanent house that is always open has none of that urgency, and filling twenty-six beds month after month turned out to be harder and slower than the prototype ever suggested.

And at Emerge Lakefront in Stockholm, Evo described the friction that comes from running on generosity. When people contribute out of goodwill, the ones with valuable skills start to feel it. A teacher who gets paid for a class in the city is expected to give it free at the hub, and at some point that person quietly does the math and starts to question the model.

That is the tension that sat under the whole session, and I do not think it is solved anywhere. You want the place to be affordable, because the whole point is that ordinary people can come. You also want to pay the people who hold it together, because otherwise you are running on a slow burn of unpaid labour that ends in burnout. Someone in the room put it as a question they could not answer: how much should I get paid for making sure there are no jerks in the building. There is no line on any invoice for that. The economy has never known how to price care, attention, or the work of keeping a group of people decent to each other, and these houses are all improvising an answer in real time.

If you have ever helped run anything that mattered more than it paid, a nonprofit, a school group, a band, a mutual-aid pod, you already know this problem. Any work that matters more than it pays runs into the same wall. The value lives in exactly the part that resists being turned into a product.

The gap between the story a group tells and who actually decides

The second thread ran through almost every session, and it is the one I keep finding everywhere in this quest I'm on. A group's story about how power works inside it rarely matches how power actually works.

Evo said it cleanly. There is, in his words, a fetishization of flat hierarchy. Everyone wants to believe the place runs itself, that nobody is in charge, that decisions just emerge. Then he half-joked that the hub probably needs a boss, and argued that what early-stage projects actually lack is enough clear leadership to give people something to push against. The founder of his network approach is quite a hands-off style, and Evo described the effect of that as a kind of vacuum that people project onto. Taking away the visible boss just moved the confusion around. People stopped knowing who to even talk to.

Valerie, at Life Itself, found the same thing from the inside of a small house. When a group insists it is equal and wants no structure, structure forms anyway, invisibly, because the less shy people will systematically initiate. What you get instead is an unspoken hierarchy, one nobody agreed to and nobody can name.

Richard takes the opposite approach on purpose, and it was bracing to hear. He refuses what he calls the shadow play of pretending leaders have no power.

"I have the power here, and I am going to use it in a spirit of service."

— Richard Bartlett, Casa Tilo, Spain

Name it, hold it openly, and let people see how you use it, rather than hide it and let it leak out sideways. You can hear this conversation in any company that calls itself flat, any volunteer board, any group chat where one person somehow always sets the agenda while everyone insists there is no agenda. The structure is there. The only question is whether you can see it.

Belonging without conformity

The hardest question of the weekend was Richard's, and he has made it his actual research project. Can you do belonging without conformity? What is the smallest set of agreements that can hold the largest amount of difference before the group either fractures or quietly demands everyone become the same?

He does not know the answer. He said so. And the others kept circling the same edge from their own places.

Lucile, at Maysou, told me that welcoming a genuinely mixed group, different ages, different countries, paying guests next to volunteers, is the thing she values most and doubts most often, because shared culture is harder to build when people do not arrive with much in common. The hardest case she named was hosting Afghan refugees, where the gap in language and trauma was wider than the project was equipped to hold, and the frustration grew on every side. She did not tidy that up into a lesson. She just told me it was hard, and that she was not sure they got it right.

Sylvie Barbier, who co-founded Life Itself, put the human version of it well. The people drawn to build these places are often sensitive people in the middle of their own transition. So you end up with a community of, her phrase, fragile new babies, all trying to shed an old way of living at the same time. The thing that keeps it standing is tolerance for imperfection, in others and in yourself.

"You walk the talk, but you do not expect the perfect being."

— Sylvie Barbier, Life Itself, France

This is the inclusion question the whole wider culture is arguing about right now, just stripped down to a house where you can actually see it. How much difference can one group hold and still be a group? Where is the edge? Who decides? There was a confronting idea in the room that drawing a firm line somewhere can actually produce broader inclusion overall, because people will only bring their full selves into a space they trust to hold a boundary. I am still sitting with that one.

Each house holds a different piece

What I did not expect was how little overlap there was in what each place is actually good at. Same core problems, completely different bets.

Casa Tilo, run by Richard and his wife Nati, is built around facilitation craft. He talks about the place less as a community and more as a watering hole, a peculiar kind of university where people get immersed in group process, learn to keep a steady nervous system inside conflict, and meet the people they might build with next. The product is the skill of being together well.

Life Itself sits somewhere between a Zen temple and a tech lab. Sylvie described the position as between Plum Village and Silicon Valley, engaged Buddhism alongside a careful relationship to technology, with ritual and a sense of the sacred built into the agreements so they are not soulless contracts. Their bet is that a community needs a spiritual spine, and that modernity threw that out too fast.

Maysou is an experiment in not being a bubble. Lucile's whole design is to root the house in one specific village and become an engine for that place, opening the building to neighbours, joining the local council, treating herself as a bridge between the local and the global rather than a cool floating island of interesting people. Their bet is integration, that a community should regenerate the actual town it sits in.

Emerge Lakefront is the one thinking at scale and at the level of whole systems. It grew out of a network built on the idea that different worlds, media, activism, art, technology, politics, inner work, need each other, and it draws on the Scandinavian folk-school tradition that helped reshape those societies through adult education. With thirty-five to forty residents and room to grow toward sixty or eighty, it is asking how inner development actually turns into outer impact, and refusing to stay a cosy bubble.

Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal has gone furthest into rebuilding the economics from scratch. In my earlier interviews there, Sam the founder walked me through the token system, the company was effectively put into a Swiss nonprofit and tokenized. Tokens are held by hundreds of people, where one token equals one night's stay, per year, forever. The whole thing is run through a DAO, so token holders vote on the real decisions, from the master plan to who runs the place. It is the most literal attempt I have seen to make ownership and governance of a community legible and shared.

And Feytopia runs out of Château du Feÿ, a four-hundred-year-old château in Burgundy, on a two-engine model: a residential community through the colder months and an events business, weddings and retreats and festivals, that pays for it through the summer. It grew from a handful of lockdown residents into something that now moves hundreds of people through a season, across years of slow, unglamorous work reviving an old cultural site. Their bet is that the way people live together is itself the thing worth selling.

None of these is the model. That was the point that kept landing on me. Each house has solved a different corner of the same puzzle, and not one of them has the whole picture.

Why this is everyone's problem

The note people kept returning to in the closing circle was the simplest one. Relief. Several of them said, in their own words, that they felt less alone. One described the shared understanding as everybody going through more or less the same struggle. Another said the value was a sense of validation, of not being alone in holding the thing. And someone landed on the sentence that stayed with me, that everybody is trying to solve the same problem, and everybody is doing it independently.

A dozen independent projects, scattered across five or six countries, with different philosophies and different bank balances, had all walked into the same walls. Money that refuses to add up. Power that's hiding behind a flat story. And the daily negotiation of who gets to belong and who does not. That repetition is the actual finding. When this many people hit the identical problems without coordinating, the problem stops looking like personal failure and starts looking structural, something that belongs to the work itself.

I think these people are early at something. They are prototyping a hybrid that does not have a clean name yet, part business, part lifestyle choice, part an honest attempt to build community for a century that forgot how. They are not running from the modern economy and they are not pretending it works. They are trying to build something livable in the gap, and they are paying for the experiment with their own time and nerves.

"What is not allowed will always be possible."

— heard at the gathering

The houses are full of things the official systems have no slot for. Care that cannot be invoiced. Authority that serves people instead of ruling them. And a kind of belonging that does not ask you to disappear into the group.

You do not need to move into a château in Burgundy for any of this to matter to you. If you are part of any group that you want to last, a family, a team, a building, a town, you are already negotiating the same three things these founders spent a weekend on. How do you finance your dream? Who actually gets to decide? Who belongs and who does not? The people running these houses are just doing it on hard mode, out loud, on purpose. The rest of us are doing it too. We just do not always admit there is a room we could walk into and find out we were never alone in it.

ToGather is a field research archive documenting how intentional communities govern themselves, coordinate resources, and navigate conflict. If you want to support the work, you can back ToGather on Artizen , and the open library lives at togatherproject.eu/library .

Bringing this into your own community

The three stuck points are not only for community houses. In any group you want to last, name them out loud. Decide how the unpriceable work gets paid for or shared, so it does not quietly land on one exhausted person. Say plainly who actually decides, rather than hiding it behind a flat story. And agree how much difference the group can hold, and where its edge is, before that question arrives as a crisis.

Read the original

This essay was first published on the ToGather Substack, written by Sharon Avraham. Read it on Substack.

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