In the summer of 2020 a devastating fire surged over kilometres of land in the south west of Portugal. In a matter of hours the landscape turned into a graveyard of dead trees and smouldering black earth. Many of our community members lost everything they had. You can imagine the loss and bewilderment they experienced watching years of land and building sustainable lives went up in smoke…
However, one of the amazing things that came from this fire is a beautiful and very organic development of community. It was truly inspiring to see how quickly neighbours (near and far) came together to help. So small groups were formed to help clean the land, replant vegetation and share ideas on how to make the land more resilient against possible future fires.
Soon the need arose to organise this exchange in the more structured and efficient way. Also there were many people that were not affected by the fire who wanted to help out and we wanted to find a way for them too to receive something back one day. This is when the idea developed to create an exchange system to organise all this generosity. We started looking around at existing systems and found the CES platform where we registered our very own Flor. Today we find many people gravitating towards this idea and more and more goods are being exchanged rather than just helping hands.