Donelle, in the parish of Gundivós in Sober, was never abandoned. José Vicente Barcia Magaz, who coordinates the project for the Madrid cooperative Ecooo, prefers the word deshabitada: one family lived there for its whole history, and the bond with them never broke. Their casona, the forge and the palleira are now Guardabosques: twenty-one rooms, a restaurant, two classrooms and, around them, a growing patchwork of woods that nobody can fell.
The family sold to Ecooo, and then invested in the project themselves. Readers of our piece on Gundivós met Guardabosques as the newcomer next door, still a building site. It is open now.
A Hamlet Bought Whole
Ecooo did not stop at a house. It bought the hamlet, which means no one else can build in it, and then declined the 50% increase in floor space the planning rules would have allowed. The purchase took more than a year, because a property held by one family for that long needed its title formally established before it could change hands.
The woods came next. When Ecooo arrived, Barcia says, the trees around Donelle were about to be sold for felling; once the cooperative started buying plots, the felling was called off. It now holds three or four hectares, assembled from minifundio parcels that can be 3,000 square metres or 200, and it stops buying whenever a seller’s price climbs. There is no forest market here, he points out, so they buy slowly.
The same logic runs through the building. Barcia puts the share of materials that came out of the site itself at 85 to 87%: the stone, the chestnut, most of the oak. The south façade uses a tropical hardwood that stands up to the storms coming in from that side, and he raises it himself before anyone asks. “We have our contradictions.”
Lenders, Not Donors
The project cost about €1.6 million. Part came from a €250,000 Next Generation EU grant, part from Ecooo, and part from individual lenders, with loans starting at €100. “People invest, they don’t donate,” Barcia says. “It isn’t crowdfunding”. Lenders can recover their money, and now that the place is open their return is tied to its profits: a good year pays out, a lean one doesn’t. He is blunt about where it sits among Ecooo’s products. If you want to make money, Guardabosques is not the best place to put it.
The Wrong Test
The usual question for a project like this is how many jobs it brings. Guardabosques employs seven people, all from the area. In Sober, Barcia says, that number matters less than it would elsewhere: “There’s full employment here.” His problem is the reverse, finding people with a minimum of professional training. The kitchen is run by Emma and Toni, both trained at the hospitality school in Rosende.
The more useful question is who comes and what they spend locally. The beef on the menu is cachena raised nearby; the bread comes from Siós, in Pantón. The house wine is a mencía under the Ribeira Sacra DO, sold only on site. From November the restaurant is open to non-guests too. A double room costs €70 to €80; a course weekend, from Friday dinner to Sunday lunch with room and board, about €350. The teachers so far include the anthropologist Yayo Herrero and the actor Pepe Viyuela. Guardabosques is not on Booking. “We’re not the navel of anything,” Barcia says. “We’re a knot in the net”.
Who that network currently reaches is the open question. Most guests so far come from Madrid, Barcelona and Andalusia, many of them from Ecooo’s own community of investors, and Galician participation is growing, in Barcia’s word, tímidamente. For many guests it is a first visit to the Ribeira Sacra. Whether Guardabosques reaches beyond Ecooo’s own circle is still to be seen.
The Cows Stay
Ecooo has no plans for animals of its own. People in the area already have cattle and sheep, and they still graze them on the land around the hamlet, everywhere except the pool. Barcia’s point is that a hotel normally clears local people out of the space it occupies. Here they have stayed, which is the clearest evidence on the ground that the project means what it says about living in a place without taking it over.
