WHEN: 1-10 October, 2025

 WHERE: Senderiz, Lobeira, Spain

 FOCUS: rural co-living and creative hub

Summary of the programme

The exchange will take place in Senderiz, a 20-inhabitant village in the Galician mountains, where we’ve spent the past decade turning abandoned houses into a co-living space for creatives, educators, and social entrepreneurs. Over five days, you will join our daily life - walking, talking, cooking, thinking together - while also taking time to swap experiences and tools, and unpack the how and why behind what we do. We’ll share how we host, create and keep going in a remote setting, and open space to explore how small places can stay alive through culture, connection and a lot of improvisation. It’ll not be about presenting polished outcomes, but showing the real, unfiltered everyday, and seeing what ideas might spark from simply spending time together.

Activities will include:

• Behind the scenes of running a rural coliving and creative space - operations, funding, daily management, etc.
• Hands-on lab on low-tech communication: sharing stories from a village
• Bosquexo snapshot: how a few sketches turned into a village-wide drawing festival
• Programming exchange and co-creation time: exploring how to design creative formats in small, remote places; sketching, mapping, prototyping ideas, brainstorming what might travel into your context

Exchange period

The peer exchange with Sende will take place between 1-10 October 2025. The selected Visitor will agree directly with the Host on the exact dates for the 5-day exchange. 

Description of the Host organization

Sende is one of the first rural coliving and coworking spaces in the world, located in a 20-inhabitant village in the Galician mountains. Since 2014, it has been transforming abandoned stone houses into spaces where people come to live, work and co-create. So far, Sende has hosted over 4000 people from more than 60 countries – including international artists and creatives, educators, social innovators, young changemakers and remote workers - through its coliving space, Erasmus+ trainings, art residencies and its long-running Bosquexo drawing festival. By combining coliving, non-formal education and creative experimentation, Sende explores how creativity, collaboration and building community can regenerate rural areas - reimagining them as spaces for culture, learning and change.

https://www.sende.co

 sende

What makes Sende an Ambassador of Good Practice is its long-term presence in a place often overlooked. Rather than operating from the outside, Sende grows from within - treating the coliving as both a way of hosting and a method for learning, creating and exchanging. It doesn’t frame rural areas as problems to solve, but as places of potential. Sende’s way of doing things is small-scale and flexible: using what’s already present as tools for connection, experimentation and creative practices. It models a slower, more human-scale approach to regeneration - one that values process as much as outcome, and treats culture not as an event, but as a way of being in community. Instead of offering a formula, Sende shares a set of principles - showing how rural revitalization can begin by being present, listening closely, staying curious and having the courage to do things a bit differently.

What does Sende hope to gain from the P2P exchange?

“We don’t expect a formal outcome - but we do expect something meaningful to come out of spending a few focused days together. That might be a shared idea, a visual or written reflection, a tool that can travel, or even the beginning of a future collaboration. What matters most is that both sides leave with something they didn’t arrive with - whether it’s a shift in perspective, a question worth carrying or a quiet nudge toward the next step in their own process.”

Facilities for the Visitor

• Accommodation in Sende’s co-living space in Senderiz, and access to indoor and outdoor areas - shared kitchen, two coworking spaces, gardens, a small workshop with tools, and a reading/thinking room with a mountain view.
• Basic presentation equipment: flipcharts, markers, a projector, printer, and materials for workshops and creative work.
• Internet available in all indoors and most outdoor spaces 

Apply here