Why We Created Monte Valeo, A Vision for Living More Human

Every version of this story that we have told out loud starts in the same place: a life that looked, from the outside, entirely successful. Work that mattered, a good house, children doing well, a diary full of things we had agreed to. And underneath it, for both of us, a quiet and persistent sense that we were living a life designed by other people's defaults rather than one we had chosen on purpose.

It took a health scare to make that thought loud enough to act on. Not a catastrophe — we were lucky — but enough of one to make the arithmetic of the next twenty years feel suddenly specific. We started asking a plainer question than we had ever allowed ourselves: if the way we live is largely what determines how the second half goes, what exactly are we practising?

Living more human

The phrase came out of those conversations and stuck. Living more human is not a wellness programme. It is a description of the conditions our biology and our psychology quietly assume and modern life quietly removes: daylight, physical work, real food, actual darkness, a landscape you know by heart, and enough people around you that you are occasionally inconvenienced by them. Remove those and everything still functions. It just costs more than it used to.

The hill

We looked at more land than was sensible. Most of it was fine. This one was not fine — it was steep, dry in the wrong places and needed considerably more work than we had planned for — but standing on the top terrace at six in the evening, with the valley going gold and nothing audible except birds, the decision had effectively already been made. We spent the drive home pretending to weigh it up.

We did not buy a project. We bought a rhythm, and then spent three years learning how to keep up with it.

Why open it to other people

We could have kept it private. The reason we did not is that the effect of the place turned out to be transferable. Friends who came for a weekend left different — sleeping better, talking more slowly, making the sort of decisions they had been circling for a year. It happened often enough that ignoring it started to feel wasteful.

So Monte Valeo became a place people can stay, and a venue where facilitators can host retreats with the land to themselves. The farm keeps doing what a farm does. Guests slot into that rhythm rather than the other way around, which is, we think, the whole point.

What we are building on the land itself is described in Building a Regenerative Farm in Andalusia, and the broader idea behind all of it in What Is Regenerative Living?