Pedro Pedrosa and his wife Sofia left city life over a decade ago for a mostly-abandoned farming village in Central Portugal. After creating their home from several small outbuildings, they continued to experiment with local building materials- cork, pine, lime, and slate- by transforming three stone storage sheds into “Nature Houses."

Their town, Ferraria de São João, is part of the Schist Villages network (Aldeias do Xisto): 27 rural villages built mostly out of schist (slate). Nearly two decades ago, the government, with help from the European Union, invested in reanimating the towns as eco-tourism hubs celebrating nature and tradition.

Traditionally, residents of Ferraria de São João raised goats, but around 50 years ago, some residents began planting eucalyptus as a crop and the goats began to disappear as the eucalyptus became a near mono-crop for the area.

In 2017, the wildfires that killed 66 people in central Portugal surrounded the town, fed by the highly-flammable eucalyptus, and it was only the old cork forest that stopped the flames. In the fires’ aftermath, recognizing the value of their traditional forest, residents organized to replace the eucalyptus with new cork and oak trees in a ring around the town as protection against future fires.

Nature Houses: https://vn-nature.com
(rentals & option for a cheese-making workshop with local goat milk)
  / vn_nature  

Ferraria de São João:   / ferrariadesaojoao  

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