A manifesto is an overused word. It tends to appear on website About pages alongside photos of someone standing in a field looking thoughtful, followed by a list of aspirations with no operational specificity. We've tried to write something different: a set of commitments that describe how we actually behave, not how we'd like to be perceived.
These are the principles we're held to. If we fail them, we'll say so publicly. That last part is the one most organisations leave off.
## One: We Pay Local People Properly and First
Every contractor, supplier, and employee connected to Lusitano Retreat who lives within 20km of us is paid at or above the rate they'd get from a Lisbon-based developer or a foreign buyer with a renovation project. We don't negotiate village rates downward because we can. We don't use the "project exposure" argument that costs someone a fair wage.
The village we work within has given us access to its landscape, its goodwill, its knowledge, and its tolerance of strangers doing unusual things with their land. The minimum return on that is fair payment. The ideal return is something closer to genuine economic contribution.
When we have a choice between a local supplier at a higher price and an out-of-region supplier at a lower price, we choose local, up to a 25% premium. That's a specific number, not a sentiment.
## Two: Don't Greenwash — If It Uses Diesel, Say It Uses Diesel
We run a diesel generator for backup power during extended grid outages. Our primary vehicle for site logistics is a diesel pickup. Some of our heating fuel is wood from non-certified sources.
We have solar panels (6kWp), a battery storage system (13.5kWh), and a wood-chip boiler fed by our own coppice rotation. These are genuine reductions. They do not cancel out the diesel.
Anyone who presents their operation as "off-grid" while running a generator is lying, or confused about what off-grid means. We are not off-grid. We are lower-impact than a conventional hotel of equivalent size, and we are working toward further reductions on a realistic timeline. That is what we'll say, and nothing beyond it.
## Three: The Land Is Not a Prop
We have a biological swimming pond, a developing food forest, a chestnut grove, a small orchard, and 4 hectares of recovering semi-wild land. These things exist because we want them to exist — not to appear in photographs.
Guests are welcome in all of these spaces. We ask only that they observe the same care we try to: don't pick without asking, don't disturb nesting, read the signs. The land is not a backdrop for content. It is the reason the retreat exists.
We will not permit commercial photography or film shoots on the land that frame ecological features as set dressing for lifestyle content. We've declined two enquiries of this kind already. We expect to decline more.
## Four: Genuine Rest Is Not a Product We Sell
We can create conditions for rest — quiet, low stimulation, physical simplicity, space from professional obligations. We cannot sell rest itself. It is not a deliverable.
We don't promise transformation, healing, or personal breakthrough. These words appear in a lot of retreat marketing and they set up an implicit contract that we think is both dishonest and unfair to guests. People arrive already carrying whatever they're carrying. A week in the north of Portugal may help — probably will, in our experience — but that help is not something we produced. It emerged from the person in a different environment.
What we offer is concrete: four nights minimum, good simple food, no agenda unless you choose one, and a landscape that is genuinely beautiful. That's it.
## Five: We Won't Grow Beyond What We Can Run Well
We currently have capacity for 12 guests. We have thought about 20. We have decided against it.
The decision was based on one question: at what scale can we personally vouch for the quality of everything that happens here? The answer, for us, is 12 people. At 20, we'd need a management layer between us and the experience. At that point, the thing we're selling — the specific care and attention of the people who built and love this place — stops being what guests are actually getting.
There may come a time when we hand this off to people who are equally capable of providing it. Until then, we stay small on purpose.
## Six: Failure Is Public
The 2023 growing season was poor. We planted 50 orchard trees and 18 didn't leaf out in the first spring. Our 2024 booking season underperformed our projections by about 30%. The wood-chip boiler required three service calls in its first winter and was offline for a total of 18 days.
We write about all of this. Not to perform humility — because it's true, and because the people most likely to read this are either considering something similar or already doing something similar, and dishonest optimism is actively unhelpful to them.
The failure rate on projects like this is high. Knowing what went wrong for someone else, and why, is real information.
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*If these principles resonate with how you think about travel and land, we'd be glad to have you as a guest — [read more about staying at Lusitano Retreat here.]*