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  • Greenheart

    Greenheart is a movement promoting environmentally sustainable principles and practices, personal evolution and social transformation.
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  • Casita Verde

    Situated in a beautiful valley near the village of San Jose in Ibiza, La Casita Verde is a model ecological centre that is operated by volunteers and open to the public on Sundays.
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  • Greenheart Music

    GreenHeartMusic is a music platform based in Ibiza, Spain. Presenting artists of different influences who express their connections to nature through their music.
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  • Guía Verde a Ibiza y Formentera

    A bi-lingual directory to Ibiza and Formentera of local groups, businesses and services that offer or use environmentally friendly practices.
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  • QL Studio › Websites Made Easy

    Quinta Linda is a low-impact living space and website design studio based in Portugal.
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  • Greenheart Resonancia

    An educational and fun programme of practical, stimulating experiences discovering sustainable and respectful habits in order to face the realities of climate change.
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  • Green Ibiza Tours

    Our Green Ibiza Tours provide responsible tourism holidays in Ibiza offering a full programme of eco activities and nature happenings.
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  • Greenheart Traveler

    With the aim of promoting the Greenheart message around the world, travelling members of the rapidly growing Greenheart family will write blogs and add photos of their travels.
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  • Ibiza Gold

    The Greenheart Carob project plans to rejuvenate an important traditional economic activity, as well as motivating many local land owners.
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  • Fundación por el Futuro
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  • Tienda Greenheart

    At the Greenheart Shop you can find out about responsible consumption and ecological happenings in Ibiza. Featuring our very own Greenheart clothing range made from ecological fabrics and with fair trade considerations.

Captains Blog - December 2010

It’s been such a long time since I wrote a blog and for sure there have been many interesting things happening to write about Greenheart Ibiza, so here goes......

Casita Verde

2010 has been the second year of the new operating procedure for our Sunday meetings at Casita Verde, with the obligatory lifetime membership for all first time visitors. Originally introduced to more or less comply with local bye laws regarding food served to the public, this membership rule has fulfilled more than just a legal requirement, as it has also given us an economic advantage and has ensured that we are much more in contact with our visitors than ever before. Having everybody’s email addresses allows us to advertise any events or new offers to our expanding list of members and will eventually mean that we can use our great wealth of numbers to lobby local authorities with suggestions for improvements to our sustainable community performance here on the island. (Membership numbers are presently over 4000)

Our wonderful in-house cook Tara continues to organise the Casita Verde kitchen and household supplies story, together with her youngest son Matthaus and a variety of volunteers throughout the whole year, offering our famous tasty Sunday lunch for our members. However, it seems that we are a little less popular this year, with a thirty percent fall in visitors to the centre over the whole year. Obviously we’ll have to dream up some new attractions to get people up here to see us!

As far as improvements and new installations go, the popular chill-out accommodation now has a completely new look and feeling, since Matthaus has almost finished refurbishing it, including the installation of a wood burning stove for winter occupation. The cal oven house has also had a complete overhaul and is now the envy of every Sunday visitor who joins our weekly tour.

The Chip fat recycling centre which was originally designed by one of our ex-directors Roland Scnheider, is unfortunately still lacking completion. However, since we've also decided to use the extra solar installation for boosting our current energy system, we've been patiently waiting to receive help from different solar technicians to reform the original plan and get the thing producing electricity. So far we've had some unfortunate moments with the new alternative fuel generator blowing up after only a few hours of operation and also the donated charger converter breaking down. However, I'm quite confident that eventually we'll have a system that works efficiently and apart from having a back up power pack to eliminate our use of fossil fuels for our electrical supply, we'll be able to forge on with our idea to provide alternative fuel to friends and neighbours in return for materials and services offered. Chip fat, the base element for our new fuel supply is sourced from several restaurants on the island, who have shown interest in supporting our latest experiment, but we’ll also be offering an exchange service to our regular members, as soon as the system is up and working. Fortunately, thanks to some extra funding from our supporters at CCI Chicago who have so far funded most of the project and the fact that we now have a friendly solar technician Markus Beckermann helping us out, hopefully things should be in full motion by springtime next year.

We also have another new vegetable garden, irrigated with gray water from the community shower and clothes washing area, installed by Mariano Izquierdo who is also busy working as part of a new Permaculture cooperative intending to produce eco-veggies in the near future. Finally, our third eco-toilet is almost completed, thanks mostly to the efforts of Mariano, our chief handy man at the centre. This new toilet has been prepared for use by invalid visitors and has several improved features from the original model.

Meanwhile, the centre continues to be photographed, filmed and documented by a wide variety of national and international media, as well as receiving many new visitors every weekend - We now have a total of three motorised vehicles, including a nine seater mini-bus which we are still buying with a five year loan from the Caja Colonya bank, plus two Renault Express combi's and an electic bike, just in case there's no fuel left on the island to run about with.

We're just about to launch our first real Newsletter attempt, thanks to a new team member Dario , who joined us in Ocotober and who likes to do those things - In a nutshell, the Casita Verde show goes on!

Greenheart Music

In April this year, we managed to produce our much awaited CD4 titled 'Into the Light' and we are now busy trying to sell special selections of music to various companies as gifts for their staff or for their customers. Jose Garcia has joined the GH Music team and is already working with Ingmar Hansch, designing new ways to present our music and hopefully improve sales.

Greenheart Resonancia

After a positive start to the year and some well organised visits, this project had been temporarily put on hold, until a suitable person (or persons) could be found to continue the process. With a new team consisting of Mariano Izquierdo and a professional children's educator Sylvina from Argentina, we are presently investigating the possibility of re-introducing the project for next springtime, but with a completely new concept. As we’ve seen how complicated it is to bring the children to Casita Verde, our latest plan is to go visit the schools and get the kids involved in practical ways to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. By teaching them the basics of installing home vegetable gardens and growing their own organic food, we hope to stimulate a new interest in local food production amongst young people.

Meanwhile, I am personally in the process of persuading the Morna International college to take on a respectable ‘Greening ‘project for their school and hope to begin working there early in the new year.

Greenheart Shop

Our cute little Greenheart shop next to one of the busiest parts of Ibiza town continues to make ends meet and is certainly a treasure chest of beautifully made eco-orientated merchandise. However, due to the complete reforming of the whole street during the first part of the year, the shop didn't open until mid August, therefore losing a huge part of the possible summer trade. Hopefully when our economist friend Jose Garcia begins his work with us in the near future, I think we'll give it much more of a promotional boost and could see it booming as a successful commercial enterprise into the future. Perhaps with some new blood injected into the team over the next year and some new concepts like 'GH on-line shopping for goods and services’, we can come up with a feasible action plan to accelerate the progress a bit!

Greenheart Guide to Ibiza & Formentera

This wonderful Green-business marketing device, first launched as a dual language paperback copy in 2004 after much dedicated work from many of our core team and a heavy financial input from our foundation, seems to have taken a position on the back burner of our projects file, as we have lacked any real resources and energy to revive it into the planned on-line version of our dreams. However, hopefully this little golden nugget is going to shine once again and even be transformed into a tidy on-line Greenheart family business some day soon.

Eco tourism project

For the most of this year, the Greenheart eco-tourism project had been moved towards the back burner, as Mike Macleod has been away doing some Greenheart Traveller stories and Ana Santos, the other project director has been dedicated to her Pilates and Shangra dance classes. However, our new friend and supporter Marzena Maksymiuk from Poland has re-invented the project with a lots of good energy and will very soon be offering Greenheart Fit'n'chill holidays, (see www.fitnchill.com) starting at Easter time next year, then continuing through the summer. Hopefully, we can combine this effort with those of Ana and Mike, to make some forwards movement with this project which we believe is very important for the evolution of Ibiza, as a sustainable island tourist destination.

Ibiza Gold - Carob revival

This project continues it's slow progress forwards, even if at some times it seems to get stuck along the way. However, at least we are many more people now working on the subject of getting the local farmers back out there picking their carobs and hopefully soon, the local cooperative in San Antonio will be buying the necessary machinery to provide us with the raw material for our syrup making process.

Apart from myself, Tara and Carlos de las Heras, we've now teamed up with some friends Gabriel and Javier, who run a foundation called Estudis Eivissa (CEAV), with an office in 'Sa Coma' the disused army barracks just off the San Antonio Ibiza road. We're also working with the new Ibiza Preservation Fund, to find the financial resources to buy the new machinery as well as investigating different ways to improve the manufacturing process. For this reason, I was recently in Vitoria working along side Senen Gonzalez, the inventor of the syrup making process, attempting to use his wonderful new ROBOQBO to do the whole business. However, our experiments weren't too sucessful, as the resulting syrup wasn't tasting very good at all, so I have decided it must be time to go see how other factories make carob syrup and proceed from there.

One good news is that the 'Carocola' (cola from Carob) idea has been evolving, thanks to Dani, a talented young cook from San Sebastian, so at least the recipe list keeps growing, while we wait for an advance on making the raw material in a more economic way.
Meanwhile, next year, on the 9th and 10th of June, the foundation CEAV are organising a special Carob Congress, in the large congress hall in Santa Eulalia. They’'ll be inviting guest speakers from everywhere in the world where they produce carob, as well as demonstrating the wonderful selection of products we can make with this so far very much under-appreciated local food source.

Ibiza Limpia Campaign

This campaign, which was more or less invented as a result of this year's Earthrun event in April, basically consisted of doing five beach cleaning events throughout the summer (one in each of the five municipalities of the island), making a short documentary film to be shown on boats, planes and in cinemas and finally placing one or more large informative posters in prominent positions in the entrance to Ibiza's airport. So far, the five beaches have been cleaned and the documentary film finished, thanks mainly to myself and a young film maker called Giacomo Gex who is an ex-student of the Morna international college (see the movie here). All that remains to be done is to show the film to the island council, so they can begin to use it and also to convince them that they should at least pay for the informative poster for the airport, even if we have to make it ourselves. I had a meeting with Marisol Torres from the environmental department this Wednesday to discuss this, as well as the Greenheart Resonancia project. She liked the film, but will contact me when's she's shown it to the rest of the department and see if we can at least begin by putting the movie on the Formentera ferries.

Ibiza Transmission Mission

The transition movement, which actually encompasses just about everything we do and much much more, seems to have taken up a key position on our 2010 agenda and has become a main focus for nearly all our other projects (see www.ibiza-transition-island.com)
Basically, we began to move the transition story in early summer, after receiving and watching the specially made documentary film 'In Transition'. First we started having meetings and discussing how we should begin. Soon after this, we formed a basic team of six people and began working on content for a new web-site called www.ibiza-transition-island.com, together with a Dutch couple called Peter and Yasha Gerrits. The summer time Casita team invented a great logo for the new movement and had our friend Mathieu Iking make it into a real graphic. In late July, myself and Tara went to London to do a transition training course, preparing to get our local group recognised at an 'official' level. Well, that part wasn't a really fast movie but finally we received notice only a few days ago, that our group here in Ibiza is now 'Official'.

We now have to move to the next stage and apart from showing the movie 'In Transition' in many more places, we need to have even more serious meetings and get as many active groups organised as possible, so that there's a real Transition Mission BUZZ going on..............all over the island!

I’d like to say a big thank you to Emanuel Kuntzelman and Laura Rose from the Foundation for the Future for their wonderful support for all our projects and to my old friend Alex Marou for his kind donations of money and useful things like a car and a solar energy converter. I’d like to thank our present resident staff, (Tara, Matthaus, Mike, Mariano & Dario), as well as the twenty eight or so ‘live in volunteers’ from all over the world, who helped out this year - Leesa, Vera, Rosa, Romina and Illo, Sarah, Amanda, Micaeli, Sunil, Julien, Lea, Birga, Sanja, Juan and Inma, Bernadette, Mariana, Jessica, Jose, Aiwu and Alexis, Peter, Jaime, Sophie, Marzena, Joshua, Juan and David, plus Gereón, who turns up every Sunday to help us with our weekly open day event and our resident DJ Charles. I’d also like to thank all those other Sunday helpers who have participated in some way to making our Casita Verde an attractive and friendly place to visit.

Well done for reading to the end! As a reward, below is a slideshow with many great photos of the actions and happenings we've been involved in this year in Ibiza.