I was hiking near Montseny again. The air was absurdly clean, all damp pine and silence, the kind of quiet that feels heavy, like it’s leaning on your thoughts. I’d taken a wrong turn (on purpose, maybe) and ended up on a narrow trail flanked by dry-stone walls dissolving into moss. Behind one, a fig tree had declared independence and started growing sideways out of an old roof.
That roof belonged to a masía — the husk of one. Half-eaten by brambles. The kind of place where owls move in and local teenagers dare each other to spend the night.
I stood there staring at it, thinking about ghosts and zoning laws.
There’s this strange thing in Catalonia. The more you try to live “naturally” — off-grid, simple, low impact — the more complicated it gets. Because most of these rural homes, especially around protected parks like Montseny or Garrotxa, are tangled up in conservation zones, municipal regulations, or old laws that seem designed to confuse exactly the kind of people who want to live in them.
It’s like the region wants to preserve its wildness — but doesn’t quite know what to do with all the ruins. Or the foreigners showing up with compost toilets and solar panels and dreams of owning goats.
I met a biologist once, a Dutch woman called Marleen. We’d both ended up at the same ecological co-op workshop in Vallgorguina, which sounds like a made-up Tolkien place but is very much real. She had just bought a restored stone house on the edge of a protected woodland, through a local agency called Cottage Properties. I asked her how she managed it — thinking I might learn some loophole or secret handshake.
“Patience,” she said. “And a very, very good lawyer.”
Apparently, even finding a place that’s legally liveable — never mind sustainable — involves sifting through decades of permissions, boundaries, and bureaucracy. And then there’s water. Firebreaks. Wildlife corridors. It’s not just about charm and renovation potential. It’s about what’s allowed to exist.
That masía I stumbled on? Probably on land too protected to ever touch again. Or maybe already owned by someone in Zurich who’s never set foot in it. Or maybe it’s just stuck — not wild enough to rewild, not habitable enough to fix.
But then I think of Marleen, her boots at the door, collecting rainwater and leaving part of her land to go feral on purpose.
That’s the weird paradox here. If you want to live close to nature, you’d better be ready to fight for it — on paper, in town halls, with biologists and builders and mayors who only answer emails on Tuesdays between 10 and 11am. Because nature doesn’t always get to decide where it grows back. Sometimes the law does.
And sometimes… a fig tree wins anyway.