Teachers

Our course locations vary greatly climatically, culturally and geographically. On site we have people with specialist knowledge to share with students. This could vary widely from medicinal plant knowledge in natural forest environments to alternative economics to how to build traditional clay ovens, rocket stoves or eco-buildings.

Adriana Garcia Aparicio – Teacher

Adriana is a passionate biologist and botanist, fascinated by the wild world of plants as bio-indicators, medicines, foods and teachers. 

She has co-facilitated almost a dozen PDCs and has studied Ecovillage Design through Gaia University. Her other focus, honed through years of study and community-living is the group decision making process of Sociocracy.

Her journey learning and teaching through some of the most well-established eco-projects/villages all over Europe has lead to a deep understanding of the potential a society can enjoy with evenly-distributed power, collaborative-efforts, inclusion and nature connection. She’s committed to sharing this knowledge.

She facilitates PDCs with Circle Permaculture, with Wendy Howard at Quinta do Vale and with “Rúcula team” in Murcia. She collaborates with the organization Sunseed Desert Technology, where she is also trustee.

She is also a great partner for acroyoga and loves to dance!

Candela Vargas Poveda – Teacher

Candela studied biology at the University of Granada, and holds a Masters in Nature Management from Copenhagen University, which she received for her thesis on Forest Gardens Design and Implementation.. She is a cofounder of FFIRN (Food Forest International Research Network), and has been a member of the board of Permaculture Denmark for 5 years, and is the president of REPESEI, As well as having been a volunteer coordinator at a pioneer urban garden in Copenhagen, Byhaven 2200, Candela has been involved with many other projects such as Seed Pop Up, Gift circle, and other Environmental / Cultural collectives. She is a L.A.N.D advisor and has taught permaculture in Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Italy and Spain. She has recently returned to the Iberian peninsula where she is working on the permaculture networks PI and REPESEI. She loves gathering wild foods, doing acroyoga, and singing her Permaculture songs.

Katrin Schwere – Teacher and host, Ekbacka Gård

Hamburg native Katrin has been living permaculture for decades, and is a master homesteader, passionate teacher and vegetarian chef (with a particular knack for foraging and food preservation). She is a mother of 5, and with her partner Bo has fostered over a dozen children. Hearts don’t come larger. She has worked her farm Ekbacka Gård for over a decade with the help of the wwoofing community, and is involved with the Swedish Permaculture Association and transition movement. As well as this, she enjoys native American healing ceremonies, free dance and reiki. 

Wendy Howard – Teacher

Wendy Howard grew up in the UK at a time when rural self-sufficiency was still the ‘norm’. She studied biology and ecology at university in the 1970s but never finished. The linear reductionist approach, the overspecialisation, and the absence of the very thing which distinguishes the life sciences – life! – felt instinctively wrong. It led her into a lifetime’s autodidactic study which eventually, several careers and 3 children later, came full circle back to the land.

For the last decade she has been custodian of 2 hectares of Portuguese mountainside where she’s regenerating soils, land and buildings and developing the site as an off-grid permaculture demonstration and education project. Following the catastrophic wildfires of October 2017 which devastated the entire region, she has been working with a local team to help address the wider scale environmental destruction in the area while trying to restore the damage to her own project.

Liselotte Wuite – Teacher

Since a young age Liselotte has been exposed to many different cultures and landscapes. This opened up fascination and deep respect for the living and breathing world around her. While finishing her studies of Anthropology and Ecology at the University College Utrecht in 2013, she set off to Costa Rica to conduct research for her thesis. This is where she fell in love with a simple way of living, in balance with nature, combining more recent expertise with ancestral knowledge. In 2016 she sat the PDC course in Sunseed where she subsequently ended up coordinating for a year. Seeing the transformation in people, their habits, and their way of living, inspired her to keep sharing knowledge and the importance of raising consciousness, using Permaculture as a tool to move forward.

Travels through South America in 2014 to 2016 and experiences in the Netherlands and Spain, all led to a desire to share this vision of a more sustainable way of life. The various homesteads and educational projects gave her experience in diverse elements of community living, eco construction, gardening, baking, seminars, preservation, natural cosmetics and medicinal plants. Currently she is enrolled in the International Permaculture Diploma with Gaia University, with the intention to expand global networks and create diverse holistic eco-social alternatives to living.

Apart from the wonders and expansive world of Permaculture, she is an animal lover, passionate baker, practices yoga and meditation and loves the art of dance!