I came to build a good life on the land. It nearly broke me. Then it taught me everything.
CreaSol is a regenerative design school and a working farm on the shore of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. This is the honest story of how it came to be — the building, the collapse, and what we learned rebuilding.
How I got here
I left Ireland in 2008. I come from a family of Irish dairy farmers, and I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life since on regenerative projects — as a designer, a builder, a farmer, an educator.
I was lucky early. I learned from real masters: agroforestry experts, bio-intensive growers, indigenous community farmers, mushroom cultivators, rotational-grazing pioneers. I worked across development, reforestation, community agriculture, agroforestry, and eco-community design, mostly across Latin America.
And then, with my partners, I started building something of my own on a hillside above Lake Atitlán.
What we built, together
Granja Tz’ikin began as a small farm-to-table restaurant. It became something much larger than that.
I built it with my partner Adri and my friend Jeremy — a landscape designer and horticulturist who’s spent over fifteen years working these highlands. Together we grew it into a diverse permaculture farm: goats and their dairy, chickens, eggs, food forests, native trees, bamboo, integrated water systems. What we produce feeds the restaurant and the store. What we learned building it became the foundation of everything we now teach.
It’s not a demonstration site. It’s our home, and it’s a working business, and it’s alive.
The part most people leave out
Here’s the part that doesn’t usually make it onto an About page.
For years I was doing the work I loved — designing homesteads, farms, and eco-communities, living what looked from the outside like the dream. And then I fell apart.
Not because I didn’t understand ecology. I understood ecology fine. I fell apart because I never learned to run the rest of it. I couldn’t say no. I never built an accounting system. I never wrote a real budget. I was a good designer and a poor manager of my own life, and the second one nearly cost me the first. Bad habits compound the same way good soil does, just in the other direction.
I tell you this because it’s the most important thing I know. What breaks regenerative projects is almost never the ecology. It’s the sequence, the budget, the burnout, the person running out of energy in year three. I learned that the hard way so that, if you work with us, you don’t have to.
What CreaSol is
CreaSol grew out of that lesson.
The name comes from Lugh Lámhfhada — Lugh of the Long Arm, the old Irish sun god, whose people understood that all life on this planet is, in the end, made of sunlight. Plants combine sunlight, carbon, and water to build their bodies and make life possible. A healthy ecosystem is simply a vast store of those three things, cycled endlessly through diversity. That’s the whole idea, and it’s embarrassingly simple.
CreaSol is where we teach it. Not just the ecology — the whole thing. How to design land that heals. How to build. And how to make a living from it without burning down your life in the process, because that last part is the one nobody taught me.
We run it as a design and project-management cooperative and a school at once, so that everything we teach is something we’re still doing.
The people behind it
Neal Hegarty
Designer, builder, farmer, educator
Designer, builder, farmer, and educator, and my role is to lead the design and teaching. Irish, from a family of dairy farmers, I’ve been in Guatemala since 2008, working across regenerative development, reforestation, agroforestry, and eco-community design, mostly around Latin America. Years of building on this hillside — the successes and the hard-won mistakes — are what I bring to every design and every class.
Adriana Urueta
Partner & co-founder
My partner and co-founder of CreaSol and Granja Tz’ikin, at the centre of both. A Colombian ecologist with a master’s in Environmental Sciences and years of experience in environmental impact studies. Her focus is sacred geometry, natural architecture, and the design, cartography and digital presentation of our projects — the bridge between ecological rigour and the beauty of how each design looks and reads.
Jeremy Fellows
Landscape designer, horticulturist & co-founder
More than fifteen years in botany, land stewardship, and highland agroecology. He shapes the productive landscapes and leads much of our watershed work, including the restoration effort with the San Pedro municipality.
Around us is a small team and a wide community — the designers we’ve trained, the landowners we’ve worked with, the neighbours who’ve built this place alongside us.
Since 2008: 4,000+ hectares designed, 500+ designers trained.
What we believe
When most people picture permaculture, they think of gardens. Compost. Chickens. When I think about it, I think about freedom — the freedom to make a living from work that heals instead of harms.
We believe a human being can be good for a landscape. That business, done right, can be a tool for healing rather than extraction. And that the best thing we can do is prove it, on one hillside at a time, and then teach as many people as we can to go and do the same wherever they are.
Make sure your landscape is set up to receive water. And make sure you’re set up to receive money, love, and blessings.
However you'd like to be part of this — there's a door.
Learn to design. Design your own land with us. Come and work. Or help us restore the lake.