EcoIsleta Coliving Community story

EcoIsleta Coliving Las Palmas, Paella dinner — EcoIsleta Coliving Las Palmas

Sustainable community LasPalmas, traditional food workshop — EcoIsleta Coliving Las Palmas

EcoIsleta Coliving Community in Las Palmas was founded by a family from Gran Canaria, Rita, Jonatan, daughter Mia, and son Liam. We are from, and we live in La Isleta neighborhood.

Our Community commitment to the neighborhood started in 2008, that year we launched a blog called ConoceLaIsleta about the history and present of La Isleta.

Since that moment we have been participating in many different organizations, activities, and associations, with many purposes, but always in La Isleta.

Organic Shop

After years of activism, In 2014, in the middle of the crisis, we opened an organic shop 100 mt from our EcoIsleta Coliving.

At that point, we already knew that we had to focus on the future of our neighborhood, we had to focus on the sustainability of La Isleta.

EcoIsleta Coliving Community in Las Palmas

One year after opening the shop, still in the middle of an economic crisis, we bought an old house that we saw when taking a box of fruit to a neighbor's house. We had been working for the protection of our traditional houses for years.

The goal was to renovate the house in 6 months, but we worked for 3 years on the renovation. We ran out of money twice, and because we wanted to keep many old parts of the house, problems appeared every second…

EcoIsleta Coliving house in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

We did the job ourselves, we built furniture and worked in welding, electricity, plumbing, painting, and design. Everything in the house was built on hand, except, mattresses, home appliances, and chairs.

We want people to understand the importance of Las Palmas Port's old workers' houses because these houses talk about our community, solidarity, and overcoming adversities, in a time when people help each other.

Purpose

The purpose behind the shop and the Coliving is to help the neighborhood face the new coming era.

The shop works in the field of the local economy, eating without destroying our countryside.

Our Coliving wants to be a place, to connect the knowledge of the remote workers with the problems of our economy and society, also an example of a Zero Waste house…

Our purpose is to build a community of people who help each other to transform our neighborhood into a sustainable place.

EcoIsleta Coliving Las Palmas

Coliving EcoIsleta, the story behind the renovation

Before renovating our Coliving EcoIsleta, I was on my way to deliver fruit and vegetables from our organic shop to a neighbor, I was walking calmly thinking about my things and from afar I saw a sign that said For Sale.

It was an old house, in our neighborhood, I took a photo and we called to find out the price, a few days later we visited it and in a few weeks we had the key, we had bought a traditional house, it was something unimaginable for me...

Reform

Rita had the idea of renting the house, so we could pay the bank money. I told her yes, that I would renovate the house in about 7 months, no problem...

Everything was perfectly planned, we had an objective...

We started the renovation and during the first months the work went well, but after some problems with the traditional wooden ceilings that I wanted to maintain, everything began to get complicated.

The renovation lasted 3 years, and we ran out of money twice, worked for a year ourselves, doing everything from plumbing to welding... we worked 7 days a week, and we asked for more money, to buy materials...

That renovation and the countless problems and mistakes, the weekends working, the YouTube videos to learn how to do things I had no idea about, all of that, helped me discover myself, to know who I am when I was ruined...

Traditional Houses

How can we keep our identity? why should we keep it?, even more, What is our identity? I asked myself many times those questions, basically because we need to understand who we are and to be honest, our Coliving EcoIsleta is helping us to find many answers.

This traditional house talks about how our families overcame many difficulties in the XX century and turned La Isleta into a healthy community, full of people caring for each other…

The identity of La Isleta is strongly connected with our traditional architecture. We have been working in the protection of these old houses for more than 10 years.

It is one of the most important heritages we have, and if you want to understand our identity and our community, you have to protect these houses.

Traditional houses

This typology is simple, but very strong, useful, and self-constructed by the owners, mainly with only one floor, and one big patio to keep animals like goats and to grow some veggies…

They have this feeling of love, care, uniqueness, art, perseverance, hard work...

We love these houses. Our Coliving in La Isleta is an opportunity to understand and experience the way workers and their families lived in our neighborhood 100 years ago…

We kept the old structure, hydraulic floors, wood ceiling, doors, etc… The renovation process lasted 3 years, we ran out of money twice and because we wanted to keep many old parts of the house, problems showed up every second…

We did almost everything ourselves inside the house, we built a small workshop in one room, and with the help of Mamadou, a good friend of ours, we worked to renovate the house and build all the furniture. We did welding, plumbing, painting, electricity, etc…

But most importantly, this is an opportunity for our local community to understand the importance of these traditional houses, that's why we always invite neighbors to visit the house.

Have a look

Repair, reuse, sustainable furniture in our Coliving...

Building something yourself is nowadays rarely seen, we don´t repair nor build our furniture or anything around us, we got used to going to the shop and buying whatever we need, we pay for it, use it, and throw it away after a while.

In a way, when buying there are no connections, or few, with that product, let's say furniture, clothes, etc... But building our own furniture creates a link with something that is part of ourselves... We weld, polish the wood, paint, etc

Perhaps they are not very nice, but unique... we spend too many hours building everything in our Coliving, basically because we didn't know how to build many things, and we made a lot of mistakes...

But we learn something very powerful, we understand that this Coliving represents ourselves, what we are, and what we believe...

And more importantly, if we did it, you can too...

Repairing and reducing

Developing a Zero Waste strategy in our EcoIsleta Coliving, has got many different angles…

There are two very important concepts for us, one is repairing and the other one is reducing. When you have these two concepts at stake, many typical options or shops get out of your mind.

Furniture is an important asset in any hospitality business, it costs a lot of money, but many customer decisions are based on the atmosphere of the furniture…

But when your principles are repairing and reducing, building with raw materials is one of the best options.

Handmade furniture

Instead of buying furniture that travels all around the world, and breaks apart after a few months, we take a different approach.

We built our furniture ourselves by hand, we use pallet wood and 30x30 square bar of 6mt long. We built wardrobes, tables, beds, doors, etc... everything is handmade except chairs, home appliances, and mattresses...

That was more work in the beginning, also it was more expensive than buying then in the shop, but in the long run fit our principles of repairing and reducing.

If you look at the pictures of the furniture we build for EcoIsleta Coliving, you will realize that they are very strong, and also very easy to repair…

And if you are asking yourself how can we repair this furniture, the answer is simple, we have machines in the house to do it, like a welder, sanders, etc, because we build them inside of the house, during a 3 years renovation process...

Have a look how it looks like

How we start our EcoIsleta Coliving journey...

I would like to talk about how we start our EcoIsleta Coliving journey because we think it could be helpful for some of you.

Starting any business is always a challenge, you have many things to learn, bills to pay, and problems to solve. Opening our Coliving was also a big challenge for us, we did our research, read the book of Gui Perdix, looked for info on YouTube, etc…

But even after gathering some info, we had many doubts, and getting colivers into an old house, with a sustainable purpose, didn’t look very appealing in the beginning…

Then we decided to start with a free week, for 7 people, they could stay for free, and in return, they would help us to launch our Eco Coliving La Isleta…

The experience was amazing, the group was great, they became good friends in a few days, even hours, and helped us so much.

We went to talk to a nearby High School and organized an Open day party, which was a great success. I mean we are very grateful for their help.

Some of them stayed in the house after the week, so we did our first colivers, others wanted to stay but couldn’t.

Leslie had the idea of a new name for the Coliving, EcoIsleta Coliving, that sounds better than our initial idea…

Having that first free week was one of the best ideas we had, a lot of people talked about us, and after, we had 7 friends, talking everywhere about EcoIsleta Coliving Canarias

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