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Portugal is an incredible part of the world.

If you’re location independent and appreciate of some of the finer ‘off-beat’ things life has to offer - surfing or swimming in the cold Atlantic, good music, ancient cities with cobblestone streets, a Pastel de Nata, chocolate filled churro, Portugal is a place to visit.

In addition to all of the above, the Community vibe that is spreading throughout Portugal is electric.

There are growing tribes of wellness and regeneration projects merging with tech-forward Web3 and crypto circles who are calling Portugal home.

I spent some time with the Refi Crowd in Lisboa, visited Traditional Dream Factory in the South, attended conscious dance events in hills of Sintra and then based for a month in the charming coastal village of Eiriciera on the West coast of Portugal about an hour from Lisbon.

Integrating your intentional project with the local community

Whenever I arrive to a new place, I immediately visit the local cowork spaces.

I generally vibe-check the different spaces to see how comfortable they’re going to be to work.

Increasingly, I find myself checking to see how strong the community within the cowork is, and how integrated the space is with the wider local community.

These two things are always correlated.

Checking a cowork’s community integration level, I’m learning, is the best indicator for how much I’m going to enjoy my time in any given area.

There are often cowork spaces that appear ‘nicer’ on face value, but the projects with the strongest community integration almost always offer the best experience.

I landed at Kelp Cowork in the picturesque Eiriciere, just a stone-throw from the rocky cliffs of the Atlantic. Free coffee, wonderful humans, an absolute gem of a Cowork space.

Unlike some of the other spaces I visited, Kelp had really maed the effort to integrate with the local community.

My decision, admittedly, was also strongly influenced by the owner Dave’s promise to make me Peanut butter cups.

I love peanut butter cups. Dave followed through on the promise, and they were indeed the best Peanut Butter cups I’ve had in my life.

Kelp Cowork and the Kitchen Sessions

One of my favourite events, and a great example of community integration, was Kelp Kitchen Sessions.

An young lady living in Eiriciera had organised, in partnership with Kelp, an event for unique travelling musicians to come and share their music with the local community.

Before the performance, a non-for-profit came to speak about the importance of developing a stronger relationship with the local Portuguese people.

One of the bigger challenges in Eiriciera, all through Portugal (and almost anywhere else awesome) is that gets overrun by travelling and working gringos, like me.

The increased influx leads to higher rent and living expenses, unaffordable by the local community. This unfortunately pushes locals out of their home cities like Eiriciera.

The situation is obviously always more nuanced and complicated than this, but it’s the general jist.

I spoke with the organiser of kitchen sessions and she introduced me to a bunch of other community projects, like Vizinha - an incredible cafe who source all their produce from local farmers and suppliers

Integrating your intentional project with the local community

Intentional community projects rely on the strength and trust formed between their individual community members. There’s a case to be made that intentional community projects are also limited by the connections and trust between the project and the community within which the community exists.

A strong theme throughout all of the intentional communities I spent time with in Portugal was community integration.

Very excited to see what the synergy between these incredible Portuguese projects and community integration brings over the coming years.

Checkout Kelp Cowork here.