Responsible travel

Responsible Travel policies – Molino Rio Alajar

Financially responsible responsibilities

1. We employ two local people from our village. They have had steady employment here for over 15 years. Periodically, we also bring in local teachers for those guests wanting to learn Spanish and Flamenco guitar.
2. All guests are given a welcome bottle of regional wine
3. We make a number of charitable donations on a monthly basis. In particular we have supported Unicef for over 30 years. We also make annual donations to Medicins sans Frontieres, Lince children’s cancer and to a Madagascan Travel Company called Ramartur for the education of children in their neighbouring village.

Environmentally responsible policies

1. We ask guests to feed the neighbouring Iberican Pigs that roam free in the woods to make use of leftover food
2. We have separate bins for glass and plastic
3. We have an ecological vegetable and herb garden for use by the clients
4. We do not allow cars to be parked next to the cottages, they have to be parked in our parking lot
5. We ask guests to walk to the village (20 minutes) instead of taking the car
6. We ask clients in the mushroom season to only pick the ones that are edible and use a special knife to leave the stems in the ground.
7. We have set out 8 circular walks so the walkers stay on the public paths
8. Before opening the pool for the season we carefully transfer the frogs to the

We only use energy saving lightbulbs and organic cleaning products from Bosque Verde

9. .We do not waste energy on heating the swimming pool
10. We advise our guest not to pick the flowers in the countryside
11. We recycle batteries, printer cartridges and paper
12. Our guests know not to do any littering but we often go out to pick it up especially the llitter of neighbours who are less disciplined in this regard. In particular the litter that comes down the adjacent river after a rainstorm
13. We ask our guests to reuse waterbottles and fill them with tapwater when they go out walking
14. We plan to look at ways we can collect rainwater in the near future to reduce our public water consumption. We currently use the rain/stream water for the irrigation of the vegetable garden in the same way as our neighbours do..Every neighbour with a vegetable garden has an old standing right to use a quantity of river water

Socially responsible policies

1. We promote the eco-friendly ham processing plant – Eiriz in Corteconcepcion as well as the eco-friendly goats cheese maker Monte Robledo in nearby Aracena where visitors can take tours
2. We promote the Flamenco concerts in our local village given by La Plazita in Alajar
3. We have restored kilometres of old stone walls around our estate (finca ).
4. We used recycled beams for all of our cottages as well as old doors
5. We have collected old beds and have upcycled them
6. We have used old roof tiles instead of new for all the houses.
7. We recommend the local restaurants .This happens daily as we do not have a restaurant ourselves.