The spring equinox has come and gone, and Catalina is putting on a real show. After the record rains of this winter — the wettest in living memory — the land has responded with an exuberance that feels almost like gratitude. The wildflowers are earlier than ever this year, and there are more of them. The air carries the scent of fertility. Here’s what’s been happening — and what’s just around the corner.
Festival Almenara – 16th May 2026
In a world where hope can feel hard to sustain, we believe that gathering — in the right place, with the right people, around the right questions — is itself an act of resilience. That’s what Festival Almenara has always been about.
On 16 May, we gather here for the 5th edition, with this year’s theme: Caring for the Future. The programme is shaping up beautifully — talks, workshops, and our beloved Human Library, where inspiring local initiatives share their stories in intimate, surprising conversations. And this year, as last year, Finca Vegana will be in the kitchen, serving their delicious locally sourced vegan menu. We’ll close — as always — dancing under the stars.
This festival is something we build together, and we couldn’t do it without you! So if there’s a talk or workshop you’d like to offer, if you’d like to share your project in the Human Library, if you want to help us with the running go the event — welcoming people, helping out at the reception desk, or serving food or drink, please get in touch. We’d love for you to be part of it.
Caring for the Commons: Building a culture of care
In our last newsletter, we shared news about our “Ampadrinar un Alcorque” (Adopt a Tree Basin) project, collaborating with Life at Finca Catalina. Nine of the ten almond trees we planted have already sprouted leaves, and the laurestine and some of the aromatic herbs we planted are already in bloom. All around them, Spanish broom, rockrose, campion, and asphodel are in bloom, and you can already see that thyme is getting ready to add its voice. It’s true that a few plants have dried up, and someone pulled up a small wild olive tree (we’ll replace it with a carob tree), but overall everything is doing wonderfully. We’ll soon install the irrigation system to support the tree basins over the next two years, and then we’ll get together with the adopters to celebrate the arrival of spring. Objetivo de Luz has made a video about this project and the concept of the commons, which you can watch on our YouTube channel.
JARA – La Janda Acción Regenerativa
We’re continuing to hold sessions in our JARA programme, which is our commitment to active citizenship and a culture of care. It offers many opportunities to care for the land, learn through hands-on experience, and join a network of people in our local community dedicated to regenerating our region. Over the past month, between 5 and 30 people have participated, depending on the day and activity. During JARA 7, we planted an invasive garden; in JARA 8 and 9, we began preparing the new summer garden, planting a syntropic hedge to protect against the wind and preparing the soil to provide ideal conditions for plant life. In an open session at the end of the month, JARA participants were invited to join the ConTribuIr course for a day to learn about successional summer gardening.
JARA meets twice a month, once on a weekday and once on a weekend, and anyone can participate in these hands-on regeneration activities. Each session is a small piece that contributes to restoring our common home. Our schedule is simple:
- 10:00 AM–2:00 PM: Introduction, ecological context, hands-on learning.
- 2:00–4:00 PM: We have lunch together.
- 4:00–6:00 PM: Second activity.
Upcoming sessions include community work in Santa Lucía, more work with syntropic approaches and preparations for the Almenara Festival in May. Join our Telegram group for up-to-date information on future dates and activities or visit our JARA page here:
https://t.me/c/almenarafestival2024/1
Co-creating with the More-Than-Human World
At Almenara we’ve always been interested in finding ways to communicate with the more-than-human world exploring techniques from deep ecology (Council of All Beings), ecopsychology (environmental constellations), the perennial wisdom of indigenous cultures (ritual and ceremony) and so on. Recently as part of our involvement in the EMCCINNO project, we’ve started investigating how we can give the more-than-human a voice and agency within the governance of the organisation. This has led us to participate in the Co-Creating with the More Than Human Sandbox series organised by the Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership, and to start to use the Kincentric Benchmarking tools.
We now have our first benchmarking result and have identified some lines to develop our work, at this point mainly focusing on bringing this work into our internal operations (we do quite well in including it in our workshops and activities). Last week we were interviewed for the first in a series of Field Dialogues which explore how this work is taking place in the margins. You can read the piece here.
EMCCINNO news: Wilding Human Culture seminar
Our participation in the EMCCINNO project has led to invitations to share our work far beyond La Janda. Last week we participated in the seminar series organised by MATIN (Managing and Assessing Transition Innovation Network), part of Aix-Marseille Univeristy’s LEST (Laboratoire d’Économie et de Sociologie du Travail) which brings together researchers working on transition, innovation and governance issues from various fields: management, geography, economics, political science, sociology, among others.
In our presentation “Wilding Human Culture: Learning to Collaborate with the More-than-Human”, we shared the experience of the ongoing collaboration between Be.Time and Almenara where ecological restoration, artistic practice, and organizational design are developed together on the ground. We framed our work through the idea of “ropes”: the relationships we enter into with the elements of an ecosystem. Each rope is a practice of collaboration with land, water, plants, people and institutions. Together, these relationships form a net of resilience that gradually integrates us into a landscape.
We used Joanna Macy’s spiral from the Work That Reconnects to travel from gratitude, to honouring our pain, through seeing with new eyes, going forth and back to gratitude as we shared how practices such as the Council of All Beings, deep observation, kincentric leadership, water-retention design, participatory governance, and art-based methods can help us reflect on what it means to wild human culture by learning to collaborate beyond the human.
Coming soon! OASIS: Exploring social permaculture
From 25-30th May at Finca Catalina, Objetivo de Luz, PermaneSer, and Alumbra Facilitación will host OASIS, an in-person social permaculture course designed to address the need to learn how to sustain community life in a different way. OASIS is a course in social permaculture design, focusing on how to ensure that projects not only function… but are also livable. As the facilitators say: “It’s not enough to have good ideas. We need to learn to relate to one another with greater awareness so that those ideas can be sustained over time.”
The course will offer a space to train ourselves in skills we are seldom taught:
- How to navigate relationships with greater awareness.
- How to navigate conflicts without avoiding them.
- How to embrace differences without breaking bonds.
- How to understand the roles we play in groups.
- How to move from reaction… to responsibility.
If you are interested in participating in the course, please write to info@objetivodeluz.com.
