GeoJournal
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9917-9 (0123456789().,-volV)
(0123456789().,-volV)
From intentional community to ecovillage: tracing
the Rainbow movement in Spain
Pablo Alonso González . Eva Parga Dans
 Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract The Rainbow is a global community that
emerged with the hippie movement in the 1960s.
Although it originated and largely developed in the
USA, it soon expanded to Europe. Due to the political
context in Spain, the Rainbow was weak there until the
reestablishment of democracy in 1975, when it was
spurred by the creation of various communes through-
out the country. This paper explores the issue of
heritage in one of the earliest and most iconic Rainbow
villages in Spain, Matavenero, asking whether notions
of heritage emerge in Rainbow contexts. In doing so, it
contributes to critical geography of heritage and
intentional communities by inquiring into the narra-
tives about the past developed by the community and
their use of space and material culture in ways that
reproduce forms of segmentarity. Drawing on ethno-
graphic methods and long-term ethnography, the
paper demonstrates the absence of the notion of
heritage as generally understood in Western capitalist
P. Alonso González (&)
Institute of Heritage Sciences, CSIC, Avenida de Vigo
s/n, 15771 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
e-mail: pabloag10@hotmail.com
P. Alonso González
IPNA-CSIC, Avenida del Astrofı́sico, 3,
38206 La Laguna, Spain
E. Parga Dans
Group of Territorial Research (GET), University of A
Coruña, Campus Elviña, A Coruña, Spain
e-mail: Eva.parga.dans@hotmail.com
culture and develops the concept of ‘‘a-patrimonial’’
processes to explain this phenomenon.
Keywords Rural geography
Rainbow
New Age

Hippie
Heritage geographies
Introduction
In the context of the global movement that began in the
1960s, Rainbow means that everyone can join the
movement: ‘Rainbow is a place where all colours are
welcome, and where you cannot exclude anybody’
(Interview 51, July 2010). In fact, everyone is
considered to be Rainbow; it is only that not everyone
has yet realised their potential (Werczberger and Huss
2014). Rainbow can also be an adjective (not Rainbow
enough), a noun (be part of the Rainbow) or a verb
(let’s Rainbow). It also designates collectives, indi-
viduals, and material and mental spaces. It is common
to hear about the Rainbow family, tribe, collective,
individual, or village, and other Rainbows. The
movement emerged in the United States as an informal
organisation that celebrated encounters in natural
spaces, letting people who shared similar interests
express themselves in a way that they considered to be
‘‘natural’’ and inspired by American Indians. The
Rainbow guide (Dalton 1994) shows how the move-
ment shifted from being an isolated event in 1970, to
123

becoming a family and a home for community
members. People could abandon their everyday lives
and spend the entire year travelling from one Rainbow
to another. The Rainbow can been seen as a nomadic
utopia, a way of life, an ideology, and a set of beliefs
that offers people a sense of belonging and community
(Tomalin 2016). New Age ideologies rely heavily
upon older, indigenous and Eastern esoteric traditions,
spiritual and holistic beliefs, and ecological aware-
ness. Rainbow participants a movement fraught with a
fundamental contradiction: they search for more
personal relationships, but their experiences are
mediated by a specific ideology that dictates the
nature of these relationships and by a complex set of
ritual practices, beliefs, ways of life, and body
technologies.
This paper explores the issue of ‘heritage’ among
Rainbow and countercultural communities, and in
particular how these communities engage with the
localness and traditions—and thus the people, past and
present—of the places they have moved into. It aims to
show that New Age, Rainbow, and countercultural
ideologies become problematic when communities try
to settle and start a new society partly or totally
disconnected from society as a whole. This is done by
examining a case study: the Spanish Rainbow com-
munity of Matavenero. Using ethnographic methods,
we demonstrate that the village has shifted from an
ethos of collectivity to individualisation in its almost
three decades of existence, transitioning commune to
eco-village, that is, a ‘‘collective of individuals’’
(Tavory and Goodman 2009). This transition was
paralleled by a shift in the ways the past is remem-
bered and represented, which are analysed here from a
critical heritage studies perspective (Winter 2013). A
related aim is to understand in what ways the shifting
relations among individuals in a communal context
may constitute a form of heritage, as broadly under-
stood by society, institutions, and scholarly work.
With this approach, this paper makes a twofold
contribution to the literature on the geography of
heritage and utopian communities, establishing a
novel connection between both scholarly fields. It
also fills a gap in the literature, as neither heritage
studies nor communal studies have fully addressed the
question of heritage within alternative and counter-
cultural communities. However, there is a need to
think about and engage more explicitly and critically
with the heritage issue both for academic purposes and
123
GeoJournal
because the question is relevant for real communities
to adapt and survive long-term.
This paper is the result of long-term engagement
with the issue of heritage from a critical stance
(Harrison 2013). Critical heritage scholarship sees
heritage as a political act and aims to promote it as an
area of critical enquiry, stepping away from the
specific economic and cultural power relations that
traditional conservative approaches to heritage both
invoke and sustain (Alonso González 2015). In
exploring the previously disregarded question of the
function and meanings of heritage in communal
societies, it contributes to the burgeoning field of
heritage geography (Graham et al. 2016) and commu-
nal studies (Pitzer 2012; Lockyer and Veteto 2015).
Certainly, geographers have explored communities
both geographically bounded and deterritorialised
(that is, nomadic and fluid) (Saldanha 2012; MacLeod
2016), the fate of countercultural movements in rural
areas (Pepper 1991; Halfacree 2006), and intentional
communities as such (Meijering et al. 2007). Mean-
while, critical heritage studies have tended to focus on
institutions and experts, who produce what Smith
(2006) has called the ‘‘authorised heritage discourse’’,
neglecting alternative instantiations and conceptuali-
sations of heritage. However, neither body of schol-
arship has explored the question of heritage within
intentional communities, nor attempted to connect the
two fields of literature.
Moreover, although heritage scholars and social
scientists have long examined the tensions and ‘‘dis-
sonance’’ involved in heritage processes (Hardy 1988;
Kearney 2009), they have, in two ways, overlooked
the question of communities where the heritage
category is absent. First, by establishing an essentialist
and ‘‘external’’ view of heritage that takes its existence
as a ‘‘given’’, whether or not people are aware of it
(Alonso González 2014). Second, by shifting the
analytic focus and considering heritage to be all
features, tangible or intangible, that a particular social
group esteems and preserves (Anico and Peralta
2009). However, this dichotomous perspective breaks
with the symmetry between scholars and the groups
that they study because the analytical framework of
the researcher does not correspond to the reality under
scrutiny (Bonta and Protevi 2004). A symmetrical
approach opens up avenues to explore material culture
not only as a dematerialised symbolic order made up
of ‘‘objects’’ for interpretation, but as ‘‘things’’ that are
GeoJournal
key components of networks of social practices
(Miller 2009). These ‘‘things’’ can be interpreted as
‘‘heritage’’, understood not as a set of objects from the
past, but as a fetishisticic social relationship specific to
modern capitalist societies (Alonso González 2017).
To explore countercultural perceptions and uses of
heritage, this paper presents an ethnographic case
study analysis of Matavenero. This choice is not
random: Matavenero is the oldest Rainbow commune
in Spain and its establishment marked a turning point
in countercultural movements in the country. It is thus
representative of a broader trend, influencing the
emergence and development of other Spanish and
European communes. It was created in the late-1980s
by northern European members of the Rainbow
movement, who decided to rebuild the ruins of a
village in the El Bierzo region that had been
abandoned a few decades before. Without roads,
electricity, or running water, and far from the closest
urban settlement, the community has changed exten-
sively in its more than two decades of existence.
Matavenero is, to use Law and Lien (2013) concept, a
slippery object of study, that is, elusive and surprising,
with many features of social life pulling the attention
of the researcher in different directions (Fig. 1).
We engage communal societies through what
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 208–209) decades ago
described as the modern forms of segmentarity
imposed by the State and other structures of microp-
olitical domination. There are multiple ways in which
we are divided into segments, both socially and
spatially, based on binary distinctions ranging from
class or gender to age or geographic location. Further
‘circular’ distinctions segment us, from the family to
the neighbourhood, the community, or the nation.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 211–212) suggest that in
more ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘underdeveloped’’ societies,
segmentations and distinctions were more malleable
and fluid, this ‘‘supple’’ segmentarity being overridden
by the rigid power schemes of the modern state. In
previous works, we have developed the concept of
‘‘pre-patrimonial’’ forms of relationality to account for
these non-modern or ‘‘primitive’’ forms of conceiving
of heritage (or not). These pre-patrimonial forms are
characteristic of preindustrial and mostly animist
communities that did not develop within the frame-
work characteristic of what Marx long ago described
as the fetishistic relationality pervading Western
modernity (Descola 2013), and whose identity was
not thus configured in dichotomous and individualised
terms (Grossberg 1996). This is generally the case in
our field of study, where most people are dedicated to
agricultural tasks, and, for them, the notion of cultural
heritage is still a rarity that is imposed by institutions
and tourism entrepreneurs (Alonso González 2015).
The specificities of northwestern Spanish rural for-
mations make the contrast between ‘traditional’ and
‘Rainbow’ communities emerge more clearly. The
Spanish northwest was characterised by forms of
community life that can be encapsulated in the words
of anthropologist Lisón Tolosana in Galicia:
The experience of neighbourhood presents a
greater moral concreteness when all help each
other in all tasks, according to an equitable dis-
tribution of rights and duties, when everyone
participates in the rites of transition of all, and all
sit together in the same table in sad and joyful
moments; when they live life in common, in a
word. (1980: 37)
This kind of self-enclosed and sustainable commu-
nity life initiated a process of decay with the
modernisation of Spain in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, leading to a rapid process of
migration to America that led to the abandonment of
dozens of villages that we have explored elsewhere.
This paved the way for recent occupation movements
of different kinds, from urbanite gentrification pro-
cesses to anarchist communes, in a similar fashion to
what occurred in Britain, Quebec and areas of southern
France (Sallustio 2018; Guimond and Simard 2010;
Phillips and Smith 2018).
In the case of Rainbow communities, their individ-
uals (or ‘‘Rainbows’’, as they often call themselves)
have not been raised in preindustrial context as
‘‘traditional’’ members of communities. Rather, they
are modern individuals trying to overcome modernity
or abandon it. They seek to leave behind the forms of
fetishisticic relationality, such as heritage, through
which they have been socialised via a rational project
or, as Herzfeld (2001) would put it, a disembodied and
self-conscious rational endeavour characteristic of
modernity. Drawing on recent scholarship on social
control in countercultural communities (McKinzie
and Bradley 2013), we have developed the concept of
‘‘a-patrimonial’’ forms of relationality, which captures
these forms of relating to the past and material culture
pertaining to modern social groups which, however,
123

Fig. 1 Map locating Matavenero
deviate from the institutional, scholarly, and societal
standards of Western societies. The concept of a-pat-
rimonial relationality thus allows us to differentiate
this phenomenon from the pre-patrimonial forms that
are still common in El Bierzo and more broadly across
rural areas of northwestern Spain.
This poses another question that lies at the root of
most countercultural movements: is it possible to deal
with the contradiction of breaking away from the
abstract and fetishistic relationality of the modern
individual through the rational logics of modernity?
Advancing our hypothesis here, we maintain that the
Rainbows cannot overcome this contradiction due to
the strong imprint of modern forms of relationality on
their subjectivity that lead them to become what
Tavory and Goodman’s (2009) call a ‘‘collective of
individuals’’. When Rainbow communities live
together for a long time, this contradiction surfaces
and their uses of space and their narratives about the
past start becoming similar to those of the non-
Rainbow world. That is, when the momentum of an
123
GeoJournal
essentially nomadic movement like the hippie or New
Age one stagnates, it can only reproduce forms of
sociability typical of Western modernity. Our inter-
pretation owes much to the research of geographer
Saldanha (2007) on hippie trances in Goa. Saldanha
shows how trances represent the peak of modern-
capitalist individualisation, with its perpetual search
for new adventures, paths, and experiences that
transform the self. He captures this process through
the concept of ‘‘psychedelic whiteness’’, which
explains how the Euro-American countercultural and
antiestablishment ‘‘escape’’ from the discipline of
their societies does nothing more than reinstate the
logics of Western modernity, in terms of class, gender,
and race, wherever they go. A situation that, with some
nuanced variation, is replicated in Matavenero.
The methodology employed to explore Matavenero
was ethnographic, following similar anthropological
approaches to intentional communities (Lockyer
2007) and heritage studies methodologies (Sørensen
and Carman 2009). We draw on our previous
GeoJournal

fieldwork in the region, which allowed us to meet

many of its inhabitants before we lived in the
community. In 2009 we began to visit Matavenero
regularly, performing most of our ethnography
between 2010 and 2011. During this period we lived
in a house borrowed from the community, participat-
ing actively in local life and conducting 27 structured
and semi-structured interviews, as well as many
informal conversations that contributed to our under-
standing of the processes unfolding in the village. We
also used visual anthropology methods that culmi-
nated in the realisation of an ethnographic documen-
tary.1 This paper proceeds as follows: It first
contextualises the Rainbow movement and the devel-
opment of Matavenero. Then, it explores the social
and political organisation of the village to finally
analyse and discuss the form and conceptualisation of
heritage among countercultural communities (Fig. 2).

The Rainbow experience

The hippie phenomenon aroused great academic

interest mainly in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and the United Kingdom during the 1970s and 1980s.
However, it has been a marginal topic of research in
Spain. This is probably due to the late arrival of the
phenomenon (the first Rainbow encounters there date
to the 1980s), its minimal popular impact and media
attention, and the elusiveness of the subject. The
global hippie network forms a body of ideas, hopes,
and potential (Matthews 2012). This ideological
content contrasts with a desire to undergo intense
and territorialised short-term experiences that can lead
to territorialised longer-term projects (Pepper 1991).
In Spain, these projects are usually equated with
processes of returning to the rural, when in reality they
derive from very different social processes, such as the
arrival of non-Spanish Rainbows in the case of
Matavenero. To date, Gómez-Ullate’s (2006) PhD
thesis is the only attempt to provide an overview of the
phenomenon in Spain, with few articles or books
investigating particular cases (Alonso 1997).
The particularity of Rainbow communities such as
Matavenero is that their members are modern—and
generally supermodern—subjects given their high
1
Watch documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
lSRYI2Wf0kc&t=2383s.
Fig. 2 The ruins of Matavenero in the 1980s. Source: Author
degree of individualisation and the rationalisation of
their life projects. As shown by Augé (2008), super-
modern is a form of spatial and temporal form of
segmentarity differs from ‘‘post-’’ and ‘‘hyper-’’
because it does not imply overcoming modernity but
an exaggeration or exacerbation of it. Thus paradox-
ically, supermodern Rainbows aim to return to
premodernity as a reaction against modernity, because
they have been raised in it, or at least, to follow
heritage scholars and anthropologists like Herzfeld
(Herzfeld 2009) or Latour (1993), in a form of
disembodied consciousness that thinks of itself as
being modern. This leads them to individual and group
attempts to abandon the fetishistic and abstract forms
of modern relationality that are the product of what
Harvey (1990) defines as the space–time compression
enacted by postindustrial capitalism. They react by
attempting to recover (or reconstruct on their own
terms) forms of socialisation based on personal
relationships and a stable settlement: the ‘‘commu-
nity’’, understood as a set of social relationships that

123

hold together a number of individuals in a given space
(Parmett 2012). However, as was the case in Mataven-
ero, one of the major outcomes of anti-modern
nomadic projects is their recapture by capitalist and
modern logics. Moreover, the paradox of this situation
is that Matavenero was re-founded by northern
Europeans, but the surrounding villages are inhabited
mostly by poor agricultural workers whose children
are migrating to urban centres in northern European
countries in the midst of a daunting economic crisis in
Spain. Their village life, rituals, and relations with the
land and agriculture—thoroughly described by anthro-
pologists and folklorists—closely approximate the
ideal of ‘‘community’’ that the Rainbows were seek-
ing. The difference, however, is that local inhabitants
do not come from educated and wealthy backgrounds
and never experienced ‘‘modernity’’ and capitalist
development—precisely the forms of segmentarity
that the youth from the area seek when they migrate.
The Rainbow ideology is still present today in
Matavenero, but more like a ghost of the past than as a
set of real practices or an ideal to achieve. Indeed, the
almost three-decade-long story of Matavenero can be
seen as a transition from the Rainbow to a more
pragmatic situation similar to the ecovillage. How-
ever, there have been constant ups and downs, with
people coming and going or, as they put it, with energy
losses and subsequent revitalisations, such as the
organisation of the 2009 European Rainbow. From the
way that members of the community refer to that 2009
Rainbow, we understood that Rainbow events (brief
territorialised meetings) function as rites of passage
for young people and newcomers, constituting key
milestones in the complex spiritual life of the ‘‘Chil-
dren of the New Age’’ (Sutcliffe 2003) (Fig. 3).
These events serve to build the identity of the
Rainbows, who are transformed by learning a new way
of seeing and doing things, new aesthetic principles
and values, and Orientalist cosmologies, understood
by Said (1985) as a series of preconceptions and
patronising cultural representations of Eastern cul-
tures. The Rainbow encounter plunges people into a
context of primary socialisation, where they are
surrounded by other individuals who will reflect an
image of themselves that is different from the one that
they previously possessed, triggering a shift in
consciousness and in the perception of the self and
of external reality (O’Regan 2016). The impact on
individual subjectivity is important because the adults
123
GeoJournal
in Matavenero often talk to the youth, recalling ‘‘their
first Rainbow’’ as a key moment in their lives.
Ideally, the Rainbow’s fundamental characteristic
is the universality of its concepts and scope: as they see
it, it is a seed that can grow everywhere (Dalton 1994).
Thus, the Rainbow is part of a broader trajectory of
white Western modernity. This is based on a concep-
tion of the individual as a project that must be
subjected to constant transformations through new
ventures and transcending boundaries, particularly
since the birth and expansion of Protestant ethics and
the ‘‘spirit of capitalism’’ to use Weber’s terminology
(Grossberg 1996). However, this constant deterritori-
alisation generally ignores the advantageous position
of Western subjects in global geopolitics and the
relative and situated (rather than universal) character
of their segmentarity patterns, which allows them to
choose to live in Matavenero or in Goa by imitating
local inhabitants who have lived that way because they
had no other choice (Saldanha 2007). New Age
ideology thus becomes problematic when the nomadic
community tries to settle and become stable, attempt-
ing to make a tabula rasa of its former culture and to
create a new society.
Such a society is to be close to nature, removed
from civilisation and communication routes. This
makes it a greater challenge, and, in their view, more
attractive. Equally, it helps to achieve the postulates of
Eastern religions and their call to let go, letting things
flow without forcing unnatural change in the world
(Elorduy 1997: 228). Like the Rainbow, the Mataven-
ero community is erratic and people come and go,
usually on two geographic scales. At the regional
level, people from Matavenero move around the
nearby villages and northwestern Spain, shopping in
supermarkets, selling handicrafts, and playing music
in fairs and at medieval market reenactments. This has
often led to conflicts with the local population in cities
like Astorga or Ponferrada due to different forms of
understanding social relations and segmentarity rules
and patterns. The school and high-school are places of
special conflict, but also contacts outside the commu-
nity have led to intra-community tensions between
those who support the interaction with tourists and
those who despise it as a form of losing ‘authenticity’.
In the last 10 years, two newcomers to Matavenero not
aligned with the Rainbow ideology have opened a bar
and a restaurant devoted to tourists, selling crafts and
local products, and triggering conflicts with
GeoJournal
Fig. 3 European Rainbow in Matavenero, 2009. Source: Author
Matavenero Rainbows. Then, when Rainbows depart
permanently from Matavenero, they usually ‘‘go
down’’ to nearby cities like Astorga or Bembibre,
where they open businesses and change their lifestyle.
However, wherever they go, the locals call them ‘‘the
people of Matavenero’’ or ‘‘the hippies’’, as the village
is well known in the area. The international network,
which we have not traced, involves movements of
individuals to their countries of origin in northern
Europe, to other communes in Spain (such as Lakabe,
Alpujarras, or Ojiva), or to Rainbow meetings abroad
and other nascent projects around the world (such as in
Morocco, Mexico, or India).
As with other intentional communities, Matavenero
faced a ‘‘double-jeopardy threat’’ to its longevity: that
is, the contradiction between spreading Rainbow
values to their children, and the possible will of these
same children (or their parents) to remain in the
community (Pitzer 2012). Indeed, most of those who
started the Matavenero project, called ‘‘pioneers’’, no
longer live there and have returned to ‘‘normal life’’
outside Rainbow, becoming entrepreneurs or public
servants in nearby villages. The use of the notion
‘pioneer’ as a spatial trope can be related with the
epistemology behind settler-colonialism, where young
‘brave pioneers’ explored and tamed nature while
colonising the new settler nations and created new
frontier spaces. Pioneers were defined as young men
who won from the wilderness with their own hands,
encapsulating many notions that remain attached to
‘Rainbow pioneers’: ‘‘a gendered order, a focus on
mononuclear familial relations and reproduction, and
the production of assets transferable across genera-
tions’’ (Veracini 2013: 315).
Only four (male) pioneers still live in Matavenero,
which raises doubts among newcomers: either they
consider the pioneers to be ‘‘failed Rainbows’’ who
left the Rainbow path, or to be deserving of respect for
having created the paradise where they now live.
Generally, the newcomers quickly learn the glorious
stories of the past about the long-gone pioneers and
become disenchanted, nostalgic, and paralysed by the
seeming impossibility of changing something in the
village after the feats achieved by the original settlers.
The narratives about the pioneers function as ‘‘cogni-
tive instruments’’ (Wertsch and Billingsley 2011: 31),
distributing knowledge and memories within the
community. This generates rarefied conceptions of
temporality, whereby the feeling of escaping modern
society and doing something new loses strength in
favour of a feeling of being a newcomer and a
foreigner in a community with its own story and
123

evolution. That is, the sense of inheriting a certain
material culture, and socialising within a hierarchy of
values based on past stories about ‘‘pioneers’’ rather
than on the basis of a future-oriented Rainbow
prophecy.
The roots of Matavenero
Like other famous communes such as Torri Superiore
in Italy (Dal Borgo and Gambazza 2017), the
existence of Matavenero is possible thanks to a
specific historic phenomenon: the depopulation of
northwestern Spain. Indeed, the reoccupation of
Matavenero started three decades after the abandon-
ment of the village due to the migration of its
inhabitants in the 1960s. The reoccupation resulted
from a series of Rainbow encounters in Genisera in
1987 and 1988 in Fasgar, both in the province of León.
Matavenero’s former teacher, a Swiss woman named
Nina, explains how it all began in the Rainbow of
Genicera: ‘A local newspaper was talking about
depopulation… It also had a list of abandoned
villages. And we thought: this is our place, it is not
Switzerland, there is room for us here’ (Interview 52,
June 2009). The way in which the pioneers remember
their origins in Matavenero disregards bureaucratic
problems and emphasises heroic aspects. El Ulli,
Lortsch, and other pioneers always recall how an
initial group arrived at the ruins of Matavenero,
cleaning and rebuilding everything, until four people
decided to stay: two German, one Swiss, and one
Catalan, who spent the first winter imitating American
Indian-style tepees.
However, the project was not as spontaneous as it
appears in their narration. A member of the regional
parliament, Guillermo Tejerina, explained to us how
the Rainbows spent 2 years applying for licenses to
settle, and how they were asked to bring Spaniards
with them if they wanted permits. This generated an
initial division in terms of class and nationality: the
Rainbows, called hippies in the area, were actually
from urban classes possessing significant purchasing
power and higher education, and they were forced to
include Spaniards in their project. In other words, for
them to be able to ‘‘settle’’ they were forced to
reconcile their interests with Spanish national forms of
social and spatial forms of segmentarity and
legitimacy.
123
GeoJournal
In addition, their choice of lifestyle was made
possible by the existence of a welfare state because the
vast majority of Rainbows in Matavenero were
northern Europeans who lived on subsidies (e.g., for
having children, basic income, etc.). In her description
of Matavenero during its formative period in the
1990s, the anthropologist Alonso described its social
composition:
The inhabitants of Matavenero and Poibueno are
a mixture of different groups; the most numer-
ous, the ‘‘sedentary mystics’’ (tribal, dedicated to
domestic, artisanal and rural work, and eager to
create a new civilisation) and the ‘‘yeyés’’
(empty, with good economic support, joined to
enjoy the delights of narcissism, bourgeois and
lacking the ideals of the movement). There
would also be a small group of ‘‘braggarts’’,
whose only pretext is to imitate, not to work and
to get some money, although these are frowned
upon and usually end up being excluded. The
less numerous would be the ‘‘gurus’’ (spiritual
guides who try to set an example and teach a
spiritual life). (1997: 517).
Many of the Spaniards who came to Matavenero
initially followed a particular form of Spanish seg-
mentarity characteristic of the late 1970s and 1980s:
the anarchist logic of ‘‘reappropriating’’ state lands,
and of conseguirlo (getting it done), that is, obtaining
some subsidy to live without work—based on a
disability, unemployment, and so on (Asociación
Malayerba 1999: 48). Although certainly not all of
them lived on subsidies, it was common and it
generated major inequalities within the community.
The early years saw steady growth—both physical and
demographic—and would later be mythified as the
golden times of the community. As summed up by
Lortsch, now recently deceased: ‘A lot of work, a lot of
partying, and a lot of rebellion. I never had so many
parties in my life’ (Interview 53, June 2010). For
another pioneer, Jorge, during the first years:
We lived as best as we could, in tents, and so on.
Clearing roads and ruins… and then with the
support of Germany, Catalonia and a bus of
people from Christiania we managed to build
and do many things. (Interview 54, July 2010).
The interviewees who lived in Matavenero during
its early years underscore the sense of collectivity that
GeoJournal
prevailed at the time. Although they numbered 140
people of whom 40 were children—many born there
without medical assistance—they managed to work
together, building houses, roads, a hydraulic system,
solar panels, and a zip line to load materials and
garbage. These initial moments are often described as
magical or spiritual, and the reason for this success
was that they had a common project and a shared goal
to achieve.
Lena, a German woman, acts as mayor of Mataven-
ero for official purposes and relations with the Spanish
State. She describes the problems involved in aban-
doning a life in common: ‘When it comes to existential
issues like having a roof and food, we did not look at
who we were. But after 5 or 6 years we realised that we
were all very different’ (Interview 51, July 2010). For
Lortsch, the disarticulation of the community was
marked by an element that only he considered
important in our interviews: the establishment of
private property and the construction of houses. As in
other intentional communities (Manzella 2010; Mei-
jering et al. 2007), Lortsch explained how the fact of
owning a house in Matavenero implied abandoning
the collective tasks of building, commensality, and
living and sleeping together. This led to segregation
within the group and the creation of families with
enclosed lives, taking care of children separately.
This process was paralleled by the decrease in the
practice of free love. This represented a key shift in
segmentarity patterns within the community. As
Alonso writes describing early Matavenero: ‘Their
existential philosophy revolves around free love…
that produces a psychological and behavioural disor-
der derived from continuous breakups. Children are
one of the most affected groups by this behaviour’
(1997: 519). The new inhabitants of Matavenero
arrived during the 2000s and are mostly young couples
with children. Their arrival has transformed life in the
village and reinforced the breakup of life in common:
they live as couples, maintain their privacy, and
fundamentally come to Matavenero looking for a
sustainable and ecological lifestyle.
One of the basic elements of the peasant and
broadly ‘‘preindustrial’’ life in Spain’s northwest was
the lack of individuality and privacy (Aceves and
Bailey 1967). Initially, abandoning the individualistic
tendencies of capitalism was one of the fundamental
objectives of Matavenero at the ideological level.
However, the Rainbows are individuated subjects with
a project that they wanted to implement according to
their preconceptions of communal life. But can
feelings of community be built and planned, unlike
in peasant social groups where this community
appeared as a ‘‘given’’? This paradox is at the root of
the Matavenero project: as anthropologist Mahler
(2008) has shown in her ethnography among Guate-
malan peasants, modernity implies the need for
predictability and security in order to abandon the
state of nature. The initial construction of water
channels, paths, and basic infrastructure reflects this
attempt to bring nature under control in Matavenero:
but is it possible to rationally plan a return to nature?
These contradictions profoundly affected life in
Matavenero and all of the interviewees acknowledge
that following the completion of the communal
construction and infrastructure, the ‘‘energy’’ of the
place had declined and common tasks were limited to
specific meetings. Lena explains this perfectly: ‘There
was still euphoria, we wanted to change the world and
do something different… but when everything was
built we had to decide what to do, how to live’
(Interview 51, July 2010). Conflicts emerged in the
decision-making body, the Council, which is charac-
teristic of Rainbow organisations. A young Portuguese
pioneer describes this development:
As time went by, the project fell apart. The initial
willingness to get to know each other, you
know?… People started to divide and relation-
ships cooled. As in any relationship, the interest
in the others faded away and the dark side of
people appeared. How to deal with that? And so
conflicts arose trying to solve this or that.
(Interview 55, July 2010)
As shown by McKinzie and Bradley (2013),
questions of deviance and social control are a constant
within countercultural communities. In Matavenero,
the underlying tensions erupted when an individual
committed an offence that forced the community to
make important decisions in ethical and legal terms.
However, the community was unable to cope with the
situation because several of the ‘‘strong’’ decision
makers had died or left. There were differing positions
on how to resolve the issue: establishing a police force
and judging the individual within the community,
appealing to the Spanish authorities, and the anarchist
position that advocated letting the individual be
socially marginalised.
123

For Eldar, the son of a group of Rainbows who
abandoned Matavenero at that time, ‘The situation was
chaotic, people did not agree, and instead of solving
the issue democratically, each wanted to impose their
ideas on the others’ (Interview 56, June 2009). Finally,
indecision prevailed and the offender in question
continued to live in the community, which led the
majority of the pioneers and much of the group to
leave Matavenero in the early 2000s. Some started a
new communitarian project in nearby Requejo, while
others rejoined the nomadic Rainbow flow, leaving for
Mexico and India. By 2016, the project had lost its
initial energy, and it is now clear that cultural and
economic differences are a barrier to the construction
of a Rainbow society. Lena, who left Matavenero in
2014, anticipated this outcome back in 2009:
Today there is less hope, we do not want to
create a world of peace and harmony. We are
more pragmatic now, and we recognise our
differences. We have grown up in a certain
system and then we come here and want to
suddenly become like the indigenous… How can
we think that we are sharing everything? That we
have left behind our ego, our society?… No, we
are always conditioned. That is evident in the
relations between Spaniards and Germans, there
are differences. I am German, and we have the
tendency to demand more structure, more organ-
isation. Instead, I have the feeling that the
Spaniards are more like that, they let themselves
go, they flow and they are spontaneous. (Inter-
view 51, July 2010)
Lena’s words illustrate the challenge of breaking
away from the imprint of modernity and cultural
differences in a rationally planned way, that is, of
revolutionizing individual and social forms of ‘‘in-
herited’’ segmentarity and establishing new ones, or
making them disappear as a whole. This is so even
under the aegis of a common ideology such as the
Rainbow, predicated upon the values of equality
between cultures, generations, and races. Thus, there
was a shift from the communalism and puritanism that
inspired the initial project—understood as a tendency
for increasing self-regulation and curtailing ‘‘con-
sumer culture’’—to the hedonism and individualism
connected to the ecological discourse and the disen-
chantment that currently prevails. Former Rainbows
now now call themselves greens or members of
123
GeoJournal
ecovillages, and they have abandoned the countercul-
tural ideas that prevailed during the 1980s and 1990s
(Lockyer and Veteto 2015). The research of sociolo-
gist Gomes Bonfim (2010) on ecovillage movements
in Spain is exemplary in examining this shift.
Although she probably overstates the case, Bonfim
does not see in these movements any trace of liberating
ideologies, communes, or hippie influence, but only
ecological and rural concerns: the communes have
now become eco-villages. Where then, as Gurvis asks
(2006), have all the flower children gone? To the eco-
villages, which form an active and extensive network
throughout Spain and Europe to which Matavenero
belongs. The shift towards environmentalism is not
only more suited to individualising postmodernist
ideologies than the old hippie communalism, but it is
also a strategic decision because it allows community
members to gain legitimacy among politicians and
society as a whole. Eldar summarises this situation:
Matavenero is a metaphor of human evolution,
but concentrated in only a few years. We started
as primitives, living with tepees, we were happy
with the basics. We helped each other because
there was nothing, we depended on the others to
survive, because that was the only way to survive
there… Then, comforts began to arrive, like
running water, things became more comfort-
able… all this in 25 years of evolution… And
now we have come to be like in modern times,
and so have mentalities changed, people are
never satisfied with what they have. They never
have enough. They think they can come and do
nothing and laze in the sun. But no, life in
Matavenero is harder, you have to work the land,
take wood from a few kilometres away… and so
you can feel fulfilled in the end, and enjoy the
relaxation and freedom that being in your place
and living in freedom gives you. (Interview 56,
June 2009)
Today, Matavenero persists, and it has a population
of about 50 inhabitants. According to Pitzer’s (2012)
theorisation of communalism, the village has shifted
from being inspired by the first wave of countercul-
tural movements that emerged with the hippie move-
ment in the 1960s, to aligning with a second
countercultural wave of environmental concerns and
seeking to abandon impersonal and consumerist urban
lifestyles. The four remaining pioneers still try to
GeoJournal
perform common tasks and repeat typical Rainbow
phrases, living their dream in their own way. But the
community around them no longer lives that dream.
Even the entrepreneurial mentality has settled in
Matavenero, with the two communal bars privatised
and run by two couples. People also sell household
products, crafts, and food to tourists in summer.
Meanwhile, other people from Matavenero and abroad
have started new projects in surrounding areas, living
in caves, in trees in the ruins of Fonfrı́a, in a church
rebuilt in Poibueno, and in a new settlement called
Matabueno that has a cattle cooperative. Is this then
the dream of a utopian community or the reflection of
individualised identities? And how, if at all, does this
affect uses and perceptions of heritage?
Socio-cultural aspects of Matavenero
Understanding the social and cultural roots of
Matavenero is fundamental to shed light on how
individualism manifests and how it is resisted while
aspects of it are embraced, as well as on how Rainbow
conceptions of material culture and the past are
structured in space. The founders’ choice of a largely
isolated location was not random. They aimed to be far
removed from urban centres, allowing them greater
independence and making life in Matavenero a
challenge that reinforced the ideals of ideological
sacrifice and freedom from the corruption of soci-
ety.The lack of roads and modern technologies forced
people to help each other and share in order to survive,
which generated more intense social relations based
on personal bonds. The adults recall that they would
gather as kids in a caravan to watch movies when the
sun was out because only one of them had solar
energy. In a process that resembles the modernisation
of Israeli Kibbutzim (Sosis and Ruffle 2004), today
each house has its own solar energy equipment and
video players, which encourages individualism.
Mobile phone coverage has also reached to about
500 m away from the village, and there is a slow
Internet connection in a common house. In many
ways, Matavenero illustrates Hernando Gonzalo’s
(2012) main thesis about anthropological individua-
tion, according to which greater social control of the
surrounding environment and greater access to mod-
ern technology necessarily lead to the greater individ-
ualisation of identity.
The improvement in living conditions and the
spread of private property have gradually eroded the
idea of community. Initially, common tasks were
carried out based on customs, following the local
Leonese tradition of hacenderas (shared tasks of
cleaning and repair) and the weekly meetings in
concejo (neighbour councils). In our interviews, the
pioneers constantly referred to these aspects to high-
light their respect for tradition, as well as their decision
to preserve common buildings and use Spanish as a
common language. In the council, decisions had to be
unanimously approved. According to Alonso,
Power is frowned upon, so there are no mandated
positions or hierarchies of political power. They
resort to consensus and group dialogue. They
have statutes, created in 1989, that regulate the
rights and duties of the inhabitants, the forms of
decision making, how to deal with disagree-
ments, and so on. The political system is inspired
on the practices of the American Indians, so that
even in extraordinary celebrations of the Coun-
cil, the ‘‘baton of command’’ is passed to the
member who wants to speak. (1997: 514)
The council meetings were usually held weekly
after someone sounded a horn. They continued to be
held until the fragmentation of the community, when it
disappeared almost completely. Communal work met
with a similar fate, as did the ban on loud noises and
hard drugs, drinking alcohol in common meetings, the
need to have a sponsor to join the community, and the
requirement to stay a whole season before having a
home. The school, nursery, communal hostel, and
productive facilities such as the bread oven and shop
still exist but are in decline.
Unlike other hierarchically organised communes,
such as Lakabe in Navarra, Matavenero lacks leaders
or gurus, and all beliefs are tolerated. Even so,
Matavenero shares fundamental traits with other
international communes described by Choi (2008),
such as a spiritual orientation and the will to imple-
ment a new ecological order where children can grow
and be educated in freedom. The fact that their
worldview is so different from that of the outside
society can become traumatic for some. As a Roma-
nian man living in a tree in Fonfrı́a complained sadly
to me: ‘Thinking how different the world works out
there compared to here, so different from how I see
123

it… if I think about it, I feel powerless’ (Interview 62,
July 2010).
Beyond social organisation, the Rainbow ideology
pervades forms of expression and gesture, dress,
evening gatherings, and ecological concerns. Eastern
philosophy is fundamental in their worldview. Indeed,
a key milestone in a Rainbow life is a trip to Goa—a
Portuguese ex-colony in India. This is complemented
by alternative calendars and animistic beliefs in
cosmic forces, animals, plants, or stones. Material
culture and body technologies also reinforce individ-
ualisation and distinguish Rainbows from non-Rain-
bows. Typical elements of the 1960s hippie movement
are present in the village, such as beards, loose linen
clothes, and vehicles such as the Volkswagen van.
However, the more distinctive colours and clothes
tended to disappear as the visual economy of the
village became less competitive in the symbolic
sphere, and clothing became more functional for
agricultural and everyday jobs. All of the hippie
paraphernalia re-emerges in contexts of contact with
other members of the Rainbow family, as with the
2009 encounter in Matavenero (Figs. 4, 5).
The partial disappearance of hippie ‘‘fashion’’ is
paralleled by a growing association by newcomers of
colourful aesthetics with happiness. A woman spend-
ing her second summer in Matavenero revealed her
nostalgia for the initial moments of the community: ‘I
Fig. 4 Colourful party in Matavenero, at the time of the pioneers. Source: Author
123
GeoJournal
see the photos of the pioneers at first and I think…
Ugh! Those times must have been hard. But I look at
them again… And they were happy! There were many
colours and smiling people’ (Interview 60, August
2010). Nonetheless, young people in the village now
tend to adopt punk aesthetics with spiked collars, tank
tops, ripped pants, or partially shaved heads, rather
than colourful dresses. This aesthetic paradigm and
way of life is a result of the influence of the city and of
the education of some children. Given that punk
ideology and aesthetics are in opposition to Mataven-
ero’s pacifist ideas, it is common for parents to try to
‘‘hide’’ their children, as they did several times during
the recording of our documentary.
These beliefs, practices, and manifestations of
material culture give meaning to their existence and
function as identity markers that allow Rainbows to
recognise each other, emphasising the familial or
tribal character of the group. This is evidenced in
expressions such as ‘‘to return to the family’’ or ‘‘to be
back home’’, to which they oppose being in ‘‘the city’’.
Similar to the Amish use of English to refer to all non-
Amish people (Kraybill 2001), they do not employ the
Spanish ciudad but the English city, which does not
refer to an actual town but to everything outside of the
Rainbow. This is related to a rejection of urban life and
values as symbols of impurity. As El Ulli explains:
‘There is no root in urban life, I cannot be happy there.
GeoJournal
Fig. 5 Building a house over a ruin. Source: Author
Here, it may seem that each of us goes their own way,
but we are all thinking more or less similarly’
(Interview 58, July 2010).
To urban life, they juxtapose the value of the purity
associated with the countryside, vegetarianism, natur-
opathy, the rejection of synthetic drugs, yoga practice,
meditation, music, and craftsmanship—which can all
be understood as body and mental technologies for the
transformation of the self. These questions are
connected to a modern concern with quality of life
and welfare. For Lena: ‘This gives me an incredible
quality of life, to feel in harmony with nature, to live in
a wooden house. Without cars…’ (Interview 51, July
2010). There is a narrative pattern that newcomers to
Matavenero repeatedly use to recount their bodily and
mental transformations. Following that pattern, they
explain their shift from a situation of illness and
weakness in the city, to a sense of strength and
energetic revitalisation. This recovery is often con-
nected to an ideological concern for the deteriorated
state resulting from artificial urban life and a return to
Mother Earth.
The new teacher in Matavenero is a young woman
from Barcelona who moved there with her family. As
she recounts, ‘I was not self-sufficient before, but now
I know about seeds, I can live anywhere. I know about
wood and how to chop them, make a fire, plant crops,
bake bread, recycle…’ (Interview 60, August 2010).
These elements increase the subjective feeling of
autonomy and freedom, and the sense of recovering
control over one’s own life removed from modern
logics. There is an ongoing individualist and existen-
tialist turn among the more experienced inhabitants of
Matavenero. The values that give meaning to their
lives have shifted from those of a community project
to those of an individual transformation of the self. As
Lortch once told me: ‘‘I realised that if I want to
change the world, I have to be able to change myself
first’ (Interview 53, June 2010). This shift from the
collective to the individual can also be framed as part
of the shift from the commune to the eco-village
widely explored in the literature on developmental
communalism (Pitzer 2012).
A Rainbow heritage?
The word ‘‘heritage’’ did not appear during our
ethnography, and it seems to lack relevance in the
mentality of people with generally future-oriented
thinking, who are focused on the next project or trip,
physical or mental. We define this situation as
a-patrimonial because, although there are tangible
and intangible elements that the Rainbows deem
valuable, they are not related to the past or conceived
of as an abstract category such as heritage. Moreover,
123

the things Rainbows value, such as a clean natural
environment, or a common house and public space, are
understood in functional rather than aesthetic or
contemplative ways, as is often the case with heritage
(Grenville 2007). The use of material culture to
reinforce ideas of communitarianism was evident
among the pioneers, who insisted on keeping all the
common buildings of the abandoned Matavenero in
their fledgling community. If material culture has the
capacity to incorporate and represent values for a long
time but only if its social meanings are maintained
(Byrne and Herzfeld 2011), we can understand that
these social meanings survived partially in Mataven-
ero in the nursery, school, bar, and the free visitor’s
hostel. This shows how heritage could certainly play
central roles in reproducing forms of segmentarity and
projecting them into the symbolic landscape of the
built space of different communities, and Rainbow
ones are not exception to this.
That is, sites representing the future of the
community, the place for internal meetings, and the
space to establish relationships with the outside world
were all held in common, and they symbolised the
connection between past, present, and future. As
Wertsch and Billingsley (2011) argue, remembrance
occurs with the help of cultural and mnemonic tools,
texts, and hypertexts in literate societies, but also
through landscapes and place names, rituals, monu-
ments, music, dance, and language. And the pioneers
knew this perfectly well, using material culture as a
way of embodying the ideal of community equality in
the ruins of communal buildings but also in the origin
myth from which the community emerged.
Material culture was used not to establish a
hegemonic interpretation of memories but rather with
functional objectives: when going to the bar, school, or
hostel, people would absorb and reproduce the com-
munitarian values of Matavenero, past and present.
This deviates from standard uses and conceptions of
heritage, which work by creating dialectical pairs
based on exclusion and separation between me and
you, we and they, past and present (Benito Del Pozo
and Alonso González 2012). Instead, the will of
Rainbows to preserve common spaces and their
materiality sought the creation of non-hierarchical
relations that established a continuity with the past.
Material culture here did not reassert an exclusive
identity as heritage often does (this is my heritage and
consequently not yours), but, at least in theory, instead
123
GeoJournal
served to affirm difference and tolerance, that is,
respect people of all stripes. Based on Deleuze’s ideas
on time, Parr (2008) develops a theory that categorises
memory types, according to their implications for
social relations, as either fascist or libertarian and
open. The use of material culture in this case would be
open and affirming, celebrating ‘the movement of the
past in the present… we do need to put the past to work
so as to optimistically embrace the future’ (Parr 2008:
161).
The great creative energy of the pioneers led them
to build many houses that they would give free of
charge to the future newcomers when they themselves
left the village, thus avoiding ending the project in a
reactionary way and instead opening it to new lines of
flight. However, it is easy to see the transition in the
village from these ‘‘propositional memories’’ devel-
oped by the pioneers, to a reactionary becoming of the
community and what Parr (2008) would call ‘‘fascist
recodifications of memory’’ among newcomers. These
people arrive once everything is already built, they
inhabit houses given to them for free, and conse-
quently the ‘‘energy’’ of the community is less intense.
Moreover, the ‘‘founding myth’’ of Matavenero is
inscribed in the memory of its new inhabitants (no
longer Rainbows), who feel displaced both from the
origins of the community and from the community as a
whole.
This shows the potential of materiality to convey
meaning: since newcomers did not build anything
together, the construction of individual and commu-
nity memories based on epic narratives was lost. This
is a fundamental aspect for the supermodern individ-
ual who understands the self as a project. As the new
teacher in Matavenero, who was very critical of the
organisation of the village, argued: ‘In the end, this
way of life is easy, you know? I came here and they
gave me land and home free, so I cannot complain…
But even so, I do not see the spirit of community’
(Interview 60, August 2010). Her discourse about an
‘‘easy life’’ stands in stark contrast to the emphasis of
the pioneers on the ‘‘hard life’’ in Matavenero. She was
clearly drawing on her modern urban values to
interpret a rural Rainbow community. For example,
instead of being grateful for having a free house, one
of her fundamental criticisms was that the house was
in a ‘‘peripheral neighbourhood’’, while the most
interesting area would be the main street and the
centre, where the older neighbours lived. However, it
GeoJournal
is an overstatement to speak of an urban centre in
Matavenero, let alone neighbourhoods.
While her viewpoint was shared by other newcom-
ers, the older inhabitants of Matavenero, still Rain-
bows, did not actually live in the ‘‘centre’’ but lived
instead in nearby settlements like Matabueno, Fonfrı́a,
or Poibueno. They are more open-minded and do not
even mention these issues, referring only to future
projects. What the new and old settlers do share is a
similar ‘‘narrative template’’. These are defined by
Wertsch and Billingsley as general, schematic forms
of representation ‘used by members of a community to
emplot multiple specific events’, which ‘constrain
people to see the world from a particular bounded
perspective, one that often precludes the recognition of
alternatives’ (2011: 34). This narrative template is
similar to the structure of myths about the golden age
of Matavenero, here equated with the time of the
pioneers.
In most of our conversations, the issue of the
departure of the pioneers emerged sooner or later. If
one of the few remaining pioneers passed by during a
conversation, the person would insist that we should
speak with him or her instead since he or she would tell
us ‘‘more interesting things’’. People refer generally to
the pioneers as ‘‘they’’, and they directly attribute to
them the legitimacy to organise and manage life in
Matavenero, placing themselves in an external posi-
tion. This external point of view allows them to freely
and harshly criticise every aspect of life in the
community: schooling, food, garbage, or lack of
communal organisation. In the early 2000s, the
anthropologist Ullate recorded an interview with
Gema, who no longer lives in Matavenero, but whose
views correspond to those of many new settlers today:
There are things I do not do in the village
because the village works like that. The heart
with which Matavenero started, what they really
began, was the first construction. That’s why
those who really started the project are gone,
because Matavenero is not what it was. They
started a real community, all together and
everything in common, but what has happened
here is that it has become too large, and the
village has slipped out of hand. (Gema, cited in
Ulloa 2004: 344)
When we mentioned these criticisms to the
pioneers, their response was always similar: the
newcomers always complain but they do not organise
anything by themselves, nor do they carry out common
tasks such as cooking or cleaning. Something of this is
reflected in the village’s material culture, with the
privatisation of common spaces and the general
neglect of cleanliness, the paths, and the free hostel.
Certainly, the pioneers use their privileged position to
sell handicrafts to tourists and take advantage of
common goods, but it has also become a burden for
some of them. The case of El Ulli is paradigmatic,
since he tries to maintain the communal spirit by
working twice as hard as others in communal tasks,
organising the community and running the common
treasury of Matavenero. In fact, one often sees him
running to do communal work… alone.
Thus, the narrative template of the pioneers is
functioning as an incipient form of heritage, a
mediated and symbolic relationship that serves to
reinstate the group identity of newcomers in a
metacultural fashion. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
(2004) has aptly shown, heritage is a form of
metacultural production that is not based on personal
relations but rather on abstract discourses. In Mataven-
ero, one of these abstract discourses is the recoding of
the social memory of the pioneers in a negative way,
which leads to the emergence of dichotomous iden-
tities such as pioneer and non-pioneer. This creates
segmentations that articulate social relationships in a
hierarchical fashion: who is a friend of a pioneer, or
who has lived in Matavenero longer. The fundamental
change in Matavenero, then, is that the legitimacy of
subjects to participate in the community is now
provided by a temporal segmentation anchored in the
past and not by their mere existence as ‘‘people of all
stripes’’. This narrative is not promoted by the
pioneers but rather recodes the social field of relations
in Matavenero.
In professing a form of memory and nostalgia for a
past that they did not experience, the newcomers do
not materialise their social bonds in space but, on the
contrary, abandon the common areas and the commu-
nity project. In the absence of a future-oriented
project, of a community under construction, individ-
ualist values take over community life. Thus, individ-
uals start relating with each other in an abstract,
fetishistic way, mediated by an objectified, dead past,
in the form of a narrative template that reflects an
a-patrimonial use of heritage.
123

Conclusion: no community without heritage?
Communal societies are partly isolated groups that
voluntarily share a similar ideology, heritage, lifestyle,
and economic structure. As with other communal
societies, Matavenero has undergone transformations
during the last 27 years, shifting from a utopian
intentional community to an ecovillage. The shift from
the enthusiastic construction of a utopian community
to the immanent life in community involved the
abandonment of the original Rainbow ideology that
had united its members. In line with broader trends
described in communal studies literature (Pitzer
2012), the ecovillage mentality that prevails now
highlights the need to become an eco-responsible
community drawing on renewable sources of energy,
with members who lead sustainable lifestyles outside
of general society and consumerism. However, in
practice, Matavenero is more than ever like ‘‘the city’’,
and its forms of segmentarity, both spatial and social,
characteristic of the dominant Western white para-
digm. Or, as this paper has aimed to show, the very
contradictions inherent in the project have surfaced,
fossilising communal forms and practices and killing
the movement itself.
This paper has contributed to the literature on the
geography of heritage and intentional communities by
exploring the relation between a Rainbow ecovillage
and its memories and places from a symmetrical
heritage perspective. The generalised sense of nostal-
gia that underpins the so-called ‘heritage crusade’
pervading modern Western societies has been theo-
rised by various heritage scholars who consider it a
result of a loss of sense of belonging, the disappear-
ance of bounded communities and places, and a time–
space compression brought about by supermodernity
(Augé 2008; Lowenthal 1996). However, this paper
emphasises the potential for alternative articulations
of the relations between individuals and groups, and
between place and memory, resulting in the absence of
a clearly defined heritage discourse and practice. The
relevance of these relations for the survival of
intentional communities has been demonstrated in
the case of the oldest intentional community of
Rainbows in Spain.
The analytical implications of our research are
wide-ranging, since it has revealed the lack of a proper
sense of heritage among Rainbows as understood by
society at large. In their search for new experiences,
123
GeoJournal
territories, projects, people, and lands, they only
reproduce the hyper-individualisation of contempo-
rary subjectivity (Saldanha 2012). The concept of
a-patrimonial forms can be useful to explain this
particular constitution of subjectivities in constant
tension between immanence and transcendence,
nomadic flow and the allure of territorialised experi-
ences. Though Rainbows’ social practices aim to
create solidarity and bonds, they do so in ways that
express and reinforce their individuality, without
necessarily creating a heritage discourse, as most
heritage scholarship tends to assume for subjects
living in modern societies (Landzelius 2009). They
use communal space as a vehicle for the assertion of
selfhood and to define their individual identities, and
in action they weave them together with a nostalgic
narrative template for understanding the past.
As geographer Bonta (2005) has shown, the con-
stitution of modern subjectivity born with capitalism,
Western science, and the Protestant work ethic is
underpinned by an ideology that implies the breaking
of the immanent bonds of individuals and groups to
‘‘go beyond’’ in all areas of life, to transform and
transcend the self. This transformation implies another
form of segmentarity, breaking with communal bonds,
whatever they may be, because every community
implies rights, but above all obligations, which place
limits on the individual freedom on which the identity
of the Western self is built. Thus, when the nomadic
Rainbow flow becomes sedentary, people start pro-
ducing abstract narratives, symbols, and myths some-
times expressed through material culture in forms
unlike notions of heritage. These symbolic mediations
serve to hold together individuals who do not see one
another or engage in personal relationships but instead
form imagined communities.
Rainbows can experiment, produce new revolu-
tions and changes, go ‘‘molecular’’ in Guattari’s
(1984) terminology, but these micro-revolutions
ignore the broader structures that make possible their
existence in socioeconomic terms, and which may
imply the reproduction of unequal relations with
others in terms of class, gender, or nationality. As
Saldanha (2007) shows, psychedelics and their molec-
ular revolutions may end up generating micro-fas-
cisms that reproduce precisely what they were
supposed to be escaping. This is not only another
example of how modern capitalism has permeated
human subjectivity in profound ways but also of how
GeoJournal
the very myth of individualism is unattainable in
practice: the trace of modernity inevitably returns.
This is not to make a blanket denunciation of
Rainbow communities: there are certainly tensions
between countercultural claims to transform lifestyles
and reproducing the same old tropes of consumerism,
patriarchy, white supremacy and gender biases, and
also many different communities, networks and indi-
vidual cases that deviate from the pattern described
here. For many it would be even questionable to talk
about a closely defined Rainbow ideology or move-
ment (Ramı́rez Blanco 2018). It has been the aim of
this paper to explore the specific case of Matavenero
(emphasizing the inner debates and different positions
that ultimately led to the dissolution of the community
as such) and relate it with wider trends described in the
heritage literature and beyond. The aim is to spark
debate on this significant although hitherto neglected
topic, and to open up further avenues of research
examining the possibility that the results presented
here might be applied more broadly. These include
comparisons of different types of communal societies
and in-depth studies of their socio-economic and
spatial configurations from a long-term perspective,
both in Spain and elsewhere.
Acknowledgements Funding sources: Spanish national
research project HAR2013-47889-C3-3-P: Poder central y
poderes locales entre la antigüedad tardı́a y la Alta Edad
Media, 400-900 D.C. El Norte de Hispania y su contexto
europeo and the Spanish national research project CSO2017-
85188-R: La construcción social de la calidad alimentaria:
mediaciones entre la producción y el consumo en una economı́a
basada en el conocimiento.
Compliance with ethical standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest
in this paper.
Human and animal rights Research does not involve human
participants nor animals.
References
Aceves, J. B., & Bailey, W. C. (1967). Community social
analysis of El Pinar, Spain. PhD, University of Georgia
Alonso, M. (1997). Análisis antropológico de una comunidad
Hippie en un repoblado berciano. In Actas del III Congreso
de historia de la antropologı́a y antropologı́a aplicada (pp.
509–524). Pontevedra: Instituto Padre Sarmiento.
Alonso González, P. (2014). From a given to a construct: Her-
itage as a commons. Cultural Studies, 28(3), 359–390.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2013.789067.
Alonso González, P. (2015). The heritage machine: The
neoliberal order and the individualisation of identity in
Maragaterı́a (Spain). Identities: Global Studies in Culture
and Power, 22(4), 397–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/
1070289X.2014.977291.
Alonso González, P. (2017). El Antipatrimonio: Fetichismo y
dominación en Maragaterı́a (España). Madrid: CSIC.
Anico, M., & Peralta, E. (2009). Introduction. In M. Anico & E.
Peralta (Eds.), Heritage and identity: Engagement and
demission in the contemporary world (pp. 1–14). London:
Routledge.
Asociación Malayerba. (1999). Colectividades y okupación
rural: Jornadas Anticapitalistas. Madrid: Traficantes de
Sueños.
Augé, M. (2008). Non-places. London: Verso.
Benito Del Pozo, P., & Alonso González, P. (2012). Industrial
heritage and place identity in Spain: From monuments to
landscapes. Geographical Review, 102(4), 446–464.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2012.00169.x.
Bonta, M. (2005). Becoming-forest, becoming-local: Transfor-
mations of a protected area in Honduras. Geoforum, 36(1),
95–112.
Bonta, M., & Protevi, J. (2004). Deleuze and geophilosophy: A
guide and glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.
Byrne, D., & Herzfeld, M. (2011). Archaeological heritage and
cultural intimacy: An interview with Michael Herzfeld.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 11(2), 144–157.
Choi, J.-S. (2008). Characteristics of community life in foreign
intentional communities focus on the differences between
ecovillage and cohousing. International Journal of Human
Ecology, 9(2), 93–105.
Dal Borgo, A. G., & Gambazza, G. (2017). From abandoned
village to ecovillage: A sustainable tourism experience by
the community of Torri Superiore. BSGLg, 67, 63–79.
Dalton, R. J. (1994). The green rainbow: Environmental groups
in Western Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Cap-
italism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Descola, P. (2013). Beyond nature and culture. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Elorduy, C. (1997). Tao te ching. Madrid: Tecnos.
Gomes Bonfim, I. (2010). A sociedade no sêculo XXI e a sua
relação com a (in)sustentabilidade e a ética ambiental.
Estudo de Modelos - Comunidades de algumas Regiões do
Brasil da Espanha e Portugal, como exemplo de Sus-
tentabilidade e Ética Ambiental. PhD, Universidad de
Salamanca,
Gómez-Ullate, M. (2006). Contracultura y asentamientos
alternativos en la España de los 90. Madrid: UCM.
Graham, B., Ashworth, G., & Tunbridge, J. (2016). A geography
of heritage. London: Routledge.
Grenville, J. (2007). Conservation as psychology: Ontological
security and the built environment. International Journal
of Heritage Studies, 13(6), 447–461.
Grossberg, L. (1996). Identity and cultural studies: Is that all
there is? In P. Du Gay & S. Hall (Eds.), Questions of cul-
tural identity (pp. 87–107). London: SAGE.
123

Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and pol-
itics. New York: Penguin.
Guimond, L., & Simard, M. (2010). Gentrification and neo-rural
populations in the Québec countryside: Representations of
various actors. Journal of Rural studies, 26(4), 449–464.
Gurvis, S. (2006). Where have all the flower children gone?.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Halfacree, K. (2006). From dropping out to leading on? British
counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality.
Progress in Human Geography, 30(3), 309–336.
Hardy, D. (1988). Historical geography and heritage studies.
Area, 20(4), 333–338.
Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical approaches. London:
Routledge.
Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry
into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
Hernando Gonzalo, A. (2012). La fantası́a de la individualidad:
sobre la construcción sociohistórica del sujeto moderno.
Madrid: Katz.
Herzfeld, M. (2001). Anthropology: Theoretical practice in
culture and society. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herzfeld, M. (2009). Rhythm, tempo, and historical time:
Experiencing temporality in the neoliberal age. Public
Archaeology, 8(2–3), 2–3.
Kearney, A. (2009). Homeland emotion: An emotional geog-
raphy of heritage and homeland. International Journal of
Heritage Studies, 15(2–3), 209–222.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2004). Intangible heritage as meta-
cultural production. Museum International, 56(1–2),
52–65.
Kraybill, D. B. (2001). The riddle of Amish culture. Baltimore:
JHU Press.
Landzelius, M. (2009). Spatial reification, or, collectively
embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia. Semiotica,
2009(175), 39–75.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Law, J., & Lien, M. E. (2013). Slippery: Field notes in empirical
ontology. Social Studies of Science, 43(3), 363–378.
Lisón Tolosana, C. (1980). Invitación a la antropologı́a cultural
de España. Madrid: Akal.
Lockyer, J. P. (2007). Sustainability and utopianism: An
ethnography of cultural critique in contemporary inten-
tional communities. PhD: University of Georgia.
Lockyer, J., & Veteto, J. R. (2015). Environmental anthropol-
ogy engaging ecotopia: bioregionalism, permaculture, and
ecovillages. New York: Berghahn.
Lowenthal, D. (1996). Possessed by the past: The heritage
crusade and the spoils of history. New York: Free Press.
MacLeod, S. (2016). Naked harbin ethnography: Hippies, warm
pools, counterculture, clothing-optionality and virtual
harbi. San Francisco: World University and School.
Mahler, J. (2008). Lived temporalities: Exploring duration in
Guatemala: Empirical and theoretical studies. Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag.
Manzella, J. C. (2010). Common purse, uncommon future: The
long, strange trip of communes and other intentional
communities. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Matthews, M. (2012). Droppers: America’s first hippie com-
mune, Drop City. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
123
GeoJournal
McKinzie, A. E., & Bradley, M. S. (2013). Deviance and social
control in an alternative community: The unique case of the
rainbow family of living light. Deviant Behavior, 34(8),
599–617.
Meijering, L., Huigen, P., & Van Hoven, B. (2007). Intentional
communities in rural spaces. Tijdschrift voor economische
en sociale geografie, 98(1), 42–52.
Miller, D. (2009). Anthropology and the individual: A material
culture perspective. Berg: Oxford; New York.
O’Regan, M. (2016). A backpacker habitus: The body and dress,
embodiment and the self. Annals of Leisure Research,
19(3), 329–346.
Parmett, H. M. (2012). Community/common: Jean-Luc Nancy
and Antonio Negri on collective potentialities. Communi-
cation, Culture & Critique, 5(2), 171–190.
Parr, A. (2008). Deleuze and memorial culture: Desire, singular
memory and the politics of trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Pepper, D. (1991). Communes and the green vision: Counter-
culture, lifestyle and the New Age. London: Green Print.
Phillips, M., & Smith, D. P. (2018). Comparative approaches to
gentrification: Lessons from the rural. Dialogues in Human
Geography, 8(1), 3–25.
Pitzer, D. E. (2012). Developmental communalism into the
twenty-first century. In E. Ben-Rafael (Ed.), The communal
idea in the 21st century (pp. 33–52). Leiden: Brill.
Ramı́rez Blanco, J. (2018). Artistic Utopias of Revolt: Clare-
mont Road, Reclaim the Streets, and the City of Sol. Cham:
Palgrave.
Said, E. W. (1985). Orientalism reconsidered. Race & Class,
27(2), 1–15.
Saldanha, A. (2007). Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the
viscosity of race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Saldanha, A. (2012). Assemblage, materiality, race, capital.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 194–197.
Sallustio, M. (2018). Le « retour à la terre » : entre utopie et
nostalgie. Le cas des collectifs de néo-paysans en France.
Conserveries mémorielles. Revue transdisciplinaire, 22.
http://journals.openedition.org/cm/2910.
Smith, L. (2006). Uses of heritage. London: Routledge.
Sørensen, M. L. S., & Carman, J. (2009). Heritage studies:
Methods and approaches. New York: Routledge.
Sosis, R., & Ruffle, B. J. (2004). Ideology, religion, and the
evolution of cooperation: Field experiments on Israeli
Kibbutzim. In M. Alvard (Ed.), Socioeconomic Aspects of
Human Behavioral Ecology (pp. 89–117). Bradford:
Emerald.
Sutcliffe, S. (2003). Children of the New Age: A history of
spiritual practices. London: Routledge.
Tavory, I., & Goodman, Y. C. (2009). ‘‘A collective of indi-
viduals’’: Between self and solidarity in a rainbow gath-
ering. Sociology of Religion, 70(3), 262–284.
Tomalin, E. (2016). Biodivinity and biodiversity: The limits to
religious environmentalism. London: Routledge.
Ulloa, A. (2004). La construcción del nativo ecológico: Com-
plejidades, paradojas y dilemas de la relación entre los
movimientos indı́genas y el ambientalismo en Colombia.
Bogotá: ICANH.
GeoJournal
Veracini, L. (2013). ‘Settler colonialism’: Career of a concept.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
41(2), 313–333.
Werczberger, R., & Huss, B. (2014). New Age culture in Israel.
Israel Studies Review, 29(2), 1–16.
Wertsch, J., & Billingsley, D. (2011). The role of narratives in
commemoration: Remembering as mediated action. In H.
K. Anheier, Y. Raj Isar, & D. Viejo-Rose (Eds.), Cultures
and globalization: Heritage, memory and identity (pp.
25–38). London: SAGE.
Winter, T. (2013). Clarifying the critical in critical heritage
studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19(6),
532–545.
123