Getting the Word Out

How the Foundry presents itself to the world, and the thinking behind it. Much of this was decided in 2025, when a new group of stewards took over communications and had to work out what the place should sound like when it speaks.

Where to find us

• Website — https://bravosfoundry.com, including the statutes, the membership form and the blog
• Email — foundry@bravosfoundry.com
• Instagram — @bravosfoundry
• Mailing list — assembly summaries and calls go to all members; ask at the address above to be added

The name you will see locally is A Ferrería — the forge — which is what the building has been called here for far longer than it has been called the Foundry.

What we decided the website should not be

When the new stewards inherited the site, the first instinct was to fix it quickly rather than well, and the reasoning is worth recording because it shaped everything after.

The old site read like a commercial listing. That is a real problem for a project whose founding commitment is the exclusion of profit: a page that sells beds implies a business with customers, and the Foundry is an association with members. Peer projects we respect — PAF, Massia — deliberately run plain, low-key websites for exactly this reason. They are not selling anything.

So the decision was a modest interim site — basic values, how the place works, how to come and how to contribute, with fewer and better images — while a longer identity process ran in the background. A branding studio worked with us through a proper process from identity to purpose and positioning, and a new visual identity followed. Both things were true at once: the quick fix was needed, and the slow work was worth doing.

Writing in the open

The blog is where decisions and reflections are published, and the tone shifted deliberately in 2025 when the stewards introduced themselves through it.

Rather than a corporate announcement, they published the intentions each of them had spoken at the general assembly, during a ritual in which a fallen eucalyptus log — standing for the Foundry — was drilled and inoculated with shiitake mycelium. Among them: that the Foundry spread spores carrying what happens here to other receptive places; that it nurture imagination for new possibilities in body and land; that we keep our minds in our hearts as we learn to work together; that it be part of the webbing of freedom for individuals and the collective; that it contribute to a hundred years of this project; that it be a safe space and also a brave space; that it celebrate diversity with locals, guests, neighbours and travellers alike.

That post did more to explain the transition than any organisational chart could, and it set the standard: write like people, publish the disagreements, and let the reader see the work rather than a finished surface. The mushroom logs from that ritual are described in the Land Care section.

Assembly outcomes are published in English and Spanish, in full, including proposals that remain contested. See How We Govern Ourselves.

Speaking to the parish

An international project in a Galician village has to earn its place, and most of that happens offline.

A weekly English–Galician language exchange runs on Wednesday afternoons, free and open to anyone in the area. It is the clearest example of the exchange running both ways: the association is not offering a service to the neighbourhood, it is learning the language of the place.

The village has its own calendar and we work around it rather than over it: San Isidro is celebrated in Bravos on 15 May, and the Aturuxo festival (festivalaturuxo.gal) brings the area together each summer. When our programming has clashed with either, we have moved ours.

Other things that have worked: posters in the bars, associations and council offices of the district for events like the card tournament; jam sessions and open evenings; and simply turning up to the assemblies of local networks. See Projects and Programmes.

Press

Coverage has come without being chased. El Confidencial wrote about the project as early as October 2019. Contraste, the German monthly for self-organisation, ran a feature on the revival of a Galician village and on the path from the Mietshäuser Syndikat model to a wider network. In August 2026 the blacksmiths' assembly was covered twice by La Voz de Galicia and once by El Progreso.

For press enquiries, write to foundry@bravosfoundry.com.

Networks we belong to

The Foundry is a founding member of Rede Aldear (aldear.me), which organises events across rural Galicia, and a member of the Commoning Spaces Network (commoning.space). It also appears on FreeingSpace (freeingspace.com), a map of projects that are non-profit, non-state, non-discriminatory and democratically governed — a project that grew out of the Foundry itself. Being findable on those maps is how most of the people who arrive here first heard of the place.

Open calls

The association publishes calls rather than waiting to be found. Two worth recording, because they say a great deal about the project's intentions.

The summer programme call goes out each winter, inviting self-organising collectives and individuals to host weeks of summer school and Sobremesa. See Projects and Programmes.

The call for collectives, published in 2024, went considerably further: an offer to hand the space — twelve bedrooms, six bathrooms, a large workshop, five hectares including a river and orchards, and numerous common spaces — to a collective wanting to develop their project here for up to two years, free of charge. The conditions were that the group help maintain the building and its surroundings, and that some rooms stay available for guests. A permaculture or agroforestry project, a hackerspace, a performing arts space, a music studio, a writers' retreat, a crafts centre: the call was deliberately open about what might arrive.

That call has not yet found its collective. It stands as the clearest statement of what the Foundry is for — and the offer remains, in spirit, to anyone who reads this and recognises it.

Stay vouchers

Members approved a system of advance vouchers for stays: supporters buy them now, the association gets resources when it needs them, and the holder redeems the stay later. They are usable from September 2026, do not include the membership fee, and are redeemed by mentioning the coupon code when booking.

It is a small mechanism with a clear logic — turning goodwill at a distance into working capital, without borrowing and without selling anything the association does not have.

Helping with this

Communications is consistently one of the areas where the association is short of hands; it was raised at the last general assembly. If you can help with social media, translation into Galician or Spanish, photography, or writing, that is genuinely useful and genuinely wanted. Write to foundry@bravosfoundry.com.