Natural Building

Natural building is a method of creating sacred, magical, and functional spaces whilst participating in a healing, playful art form. With an emphasis on simple, easy-to-learn techniques, people of all ages and experience levels can find something that they enjoy on a natural building site.

The natural building movement focuses on the use of locally available, renewable resources in order to cut down on the need for fossil fuels and reduce our environmental impact. InanItah is committed to the natural building philosophy by creating structures that are constructed from locally available stone, timber, clay soil, straw, and grasses.

Building in traditional ways brings us closer to our ancestral roots, reviving lost traditions that are a vibrant part of a community’s relationship to its natural environment. Our natural building method combines both old and new techniques. Drawing on Ometepe customs, buildings at InanItah employ local techniques such as roundwood timber framing and thatch roofing. We have also been influenced by modern natural building techniques taught by our friends at Emerald Earth.

While visiting or volunteering at InanItah, there is an opportunity to gain experience in a range of natural building techniques, including: cob, wattle and cob, home made paints, earthen plasters, earthen flooring and carpentry. There are ongoing possibilities to see working demonstrations of stone point foundations, traditional outdoor stone floor building, timber framing, compost heated hot water and gravity-based drinkingwater systems. We sometimes offer natural building workshops.