Building Something Together: Life in an Intentional Community

Attesi began as an idea shared between two friends. Today it's a community of more than twenty families. Here's what it means to build a life around land, connection, and shared intention.

From Two Friends to Twenty Families

Attesi started with a simple idea shared between two close friends: to buy a piece of land outside Mexico City and learn, hands in the soil, how to work with nature instead of against it. What began as an experiment in permaculture slowly became something much larger. As the gardens grew, so did the number of people who wanted to be part of it.

Today, Attesi is home to a community of more than twenty families, alongside a retreat space, a kosher kitchen, and the Attesi Market Café. The land is still at the center of everything — but it is the people who have made it a community.

What 'Intentional' Really Means

An intentional community is not just a group of people who happen to live near one another. It is a group who have chosen to organize their lives around a shared set of values — and who keep choosing it, day after day. At Attesi, those values are not abstract. They show up in the compost pile, the shared meals, the holidays celebrated together, and the quiet agreement to care for this place and for each other.

• Caring for the land — permaculture, healthy soil, and gardens that feed the community.
• Living Jewish life together — Shabbat, holidays, and learning as a shared rhythm.
• Slowing down — choosing presence over speed, and depth over busyness.
• Welcoming others — keeping the doors open to guests, friends, and newcomers.

What started as learning to work the soil became something much deeper — a way of living, shared.

Sharing the Work, Sharing the Table

Community is built less in grand gestures than in ordinary ones: planting a row of seedlings together, setting an extra place at the Shabbat table, watching each other's children run through the orchard. The work of the land gives everyone something to do side by side, and the table gives everyone a reason to come back together at the end of the day.

It is not utopia, and we have never pretended it is. Building something with other people takes patience, compromise, and a willingness to keep showing up. But the reward is a kind of belonging that is increasingly rare — the feeling of being part of something larger than your own household.

A Place That Keeps Growing

Attesi is still growing, and that is by design. New families arrive, new gardens are planted, new corners of the land are brought to life. Through all of it, the intention remains exactly what it was on the first day: to cultivate a place where land, community, and spirit can grow together.