🏞️ Demonstrator Site
Activities
Biocultural Hub
The site functions as a bioregional hub: a place where visitors, partners, and local actors meet, learn, and test ideas. It has developed into an internationally renowned UN Flagship Biohub—combining learning journeys, hospitality, and living prototypes of bioeconomic enterprise so regeneration is visible and repeatable, not only discussed. Two lines of work help keep the hub viable: Sinal do Vale’s own hospitality offer and the Madre Frutas social enterprise (below), which together connect revenue, training, and on-the-ground demonstration.
La Arenosa Pilot Site
Work begins on one hectare of pineapple—a stand-in for common practice: bare rows on depleted soil, high erosion, little water holding. The team is shifting the plot toward regenerative management: soil amendments, water retention, agroforestry, and biodiversity buffers, with monitoring of above- and below-ground health, microclimate, and hydrologic response. With ForTerra, they test accelerated soil regeneration mixes and aim for a repeatable measurement stack—ecology, water, and economics—to scale across the basin and inform finance models.
Diamante Luz
The collective describes Diamante Luz as its first on-the-ground node: shared land for permaculture and common resources, where residents, neighbors, and visitors co-create ways of living and working with non-human relations. The site hosts learning for ecological wellness and restoration across ages—spaces for artisans, processing kitchens, syntropic food forests, and support for people stepping into local food leadership.
Regenerative Agriculture Demonstration Network
Demonstration farms knit neighboring holdings into a learning network—sharing practices and materials in place. One early experiment uses waste wool as mulch around aronia berries. The longer-term bet is that these sites become reference points: for farmers trying new crops, for visitors relearning relationships to food and land, and for shifts in what people grow, buy, and expect from the landscape.
Dunhill Ecopark Development Initiative
Dunhill Ecopark is a community-scale hub meant to combine living, working, learning, and enterprise: roughly 38 businesses already operate on-site, with education spaces anchoring how people encounter regenerative agriculture and reflect on environmental, social, and economic impacts together. A planned on-site milk-processing facility would keep more value from regenerative dairy in the territory—linking premium products to fair returns for farmers. The hub mixes earned income, grants, and investment so the site can stay viable while the model is tested at scale.
Sustainable Building Demonstration
One of their most significant projects is the comprehensive renovation of a 2,000-square-meter industrial building on the Luma Arles site. Completed over three years in collaboration with two architectural teams, the project demonstrates sustainable construction principles. They developed 20 materials from the region within a 70-kilometer radius, using the building site itself as a key source. The building is connected by the materials with the landscape, but it's also an ecosystem in itself—collecting gray, green, and yellow water to irrigate gardens, with water filtered by algae used in their research programs.
Regenerative Agriculture Transition
One of the initial goals has been to help align stakeholders and shift from the development of almond monocultures and intensive agricultural and livestock farming practices to mainstreaming regenerative practices and developing the regional market for them. More than 100,000 hectares of rain-fed almonds grow in the AlVelAl Territory, creating huge potential for business-driven restoration. Regenerative techniques are known and work, but cultural adoption is a long-term process requiring patient support and demonstration of both ecological and economic benefits. The alliance backs the transition with education and training, farm-level assessments for farms that want to change practices, research and monitoring to document what works, demonstration farms that show regenerative management in real conditions, and early-transition support so farmers can absorb risk in the first years of change.