We both had the dream of creating our own planet, even before we met. We travel a lot, so the purpose of having a place to get back to, a place deeply rooted in what we believe, in what we sense as home, was a necessity. We’re both dreamers but accomplishers as well, so we knew we wanted to buy a piece of land that we could take care of by our own standards, in which we could build a project for us and from us to whomever would like to stay with us. We didn’t know how to call it until our 3 year-old nephew, in his innocent wisdom, summarised what we were feeling and searching for as… ‘the planet’.

 

Nothing could be more appropriate, and our planet was the ideal name for this concept of a place of peace, family and friends, a place to be welcomed, to share and gather. It took us over a year to find the right land to raise what we had in our minds. A lot of search was needed, a few heartbreaks with some locations as well; but the reward for our resilience was there: one day, in-between flights, we finally discovered a spot that cannot even be found on Google (yet).

 

There it stood, this abandoned land, 60 hectares of it needing a lot of care to bring it back to life. There was still this Summer-ish feeling in the air, and all that yellow, dry landscape entered my subconscious and brought some of my dearest memories of Africa; my intuition immediately said this was home. I stared at Steven and knew that, being an Australian, he had felt exactly the same about this raw, somehow brutal, thirsty, land. This is how our planet was born. We called it Monte da Vida - Hills of Life. Now you know why.

 

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Isabel