Welcome to Sue & Peter @ Quinta Perfume

Hello lovely people. We live in a beautiful stone built farmhouse on a traditional portuguese Quinta (small estate) in the mountains. The property is in an amphi-theatre of ancient stone agricultural terraces irrigated by a water mine flowing with abundant delicious crystal clear spring water. We are on the outskirts of a pretty village surrounded by pine & eucalyptus forest. Our land is dotted with olive, cork oak, cherry, fig, apple, orange,pear & medrona trees.
We are both yoga teachers from the uk who moved here in 2008 to run yoga retreats, work the land, do all our own renovations using traditional eco friendly building techniques, look after our growing menagerie, eventually become self sufficient & live a simpler more peaceful life treading lightly on the earth away from crazy consummerism.
We have just finished our third retreat season hosting many lovely yoga students from all over the world. We now want to open up our little paradise to enthusiastic woofers preferably likeminded souls with an interest in yoga.
We have several projects we are working on which we would love some help with.. renovating two more guest rooms, planting trees, cleaning the land, expanding the vegetable garden, establishing a medicinal & culinary herb garden, repairing terrace walls. We also welcome help with the cooking & looking after the animals. We are very flexible & open to people working with their own strengths & skills & always welcome any creative ideas you may have.
A bit about us - Peter is a fully qualified & experienced ashtanga vinyasa & hatha yoga teacher who came from a martial arts background. He originally worked in market gardening & agricultural farming in the uk & is now growing a variety of vegetables using permaculture, zodiac planting & improving the quality of the soil using technics exponded by fukuoka. He is also doing the building renovations creatively using natural building techniques. When he's not working he's trying to learn guitar (any musicians out there please we need help !)
Sue is a fully qualified & experienced dynamic & hatha yoga teacher passionately interested in the use of yoga as therapy. She is also a nutritional healer & practises reflexology. She is also really into cooking healthy but delicious vegetarian wholefoods with macrobiotic & ayurvedic influences. When shes not working (builders labourer & tea maker) shes into knitting, reading & painting.
The Animals- we arrived with two of our cats Hari & Blue(once spoiled house cats but now more than happy mousing in the hay stack) but partly due to our inability to say no we now have Ani- Nora (eternal kitten cat) Queenie, Simba & Saleem (incredibly loving & empathetic dogs) Shakti & Shiva (naughty goats, responsible for a multitude of crimes & their saving grace the milk) Willow (adoreable donkey from seville who will eventually be working the land but getting off lightly thus far) Rupert (the rooster & battery free alarm clock) & the ladies (happy free range hens who lay every day throughout the year)
Ok so thats us, now you. We provide comfortable warm accomodation either in the main house or cottage & we expect you to treat the place as home during your stay. You will be working no more than 6 hours a day 5 days a week helping in areas where your particular interests & skills lie. When you are not working there will be plenty of opportunities to explore the surrounding area, there is a multitude of stunning forest & river walks. Evenings can be spent chilling out in front of the wood burner in our comfy lounge, weve got an extensive library, wifi internet access, art materials & musical instruments you are more than welcome to use.There will be an opportunity to do self practise every day & we will teach 2 yoga classes a week free of charge. We eat communally (Sue is chef right now but you can cook aswell if you like) & we like to have a party night once a week.