People working together to strengthen Portillo and its region.

Portillo en Transición, founded in 2012, is a movement of people from Portillo and Aldea de San Miguel (Valladolid – Spain) sensitive to the combination of a series of circumstances of the moment in which we live: peak oil, climate change and the current economic crisis (details of the latter are superfluous).

Far from adopting a catastrophic or passive stance in the face of the situation described above, we prefer to understand the situation and adapt our lifestyle to the current and future circumstances. It is not about going back to the caves, but about maintaining – even improving – the quality of life in our community while reducing our dependence on oil by using less energy and fewer resources in general.

It is crucial to collaborate and strengthen local production and supply networks (of food and other goods needed in everyone’s daily life) in order to avoid consuming those that are transported across the globe. This, in turn, boosts the local economy.

It is no less important to recover and maintain in use the knowledge of our elders about food production and elaboration, use of local resources, etc., etc. They have lived through, and survived with fortitude, times of severe resource scarcity and have much to teach anyone who will listen.

In short: it is about strengthening ourselves as a local society and preparing ourselves in case hard (or even harder) times come. Should it eventually turn out that things return to the way they were before 2008 – which is unlikely – the skills we have acquired, the bonds we have created and our less resource-intensive lifestyles will not hinder us either.