The note I wrote in week one of my stay contains the sentence that defined the entire thirteen weeks: “Came to Pomar 4 weeks ago to work hard, workout a bit and fix my lack of building and maintaining social connections.”
This is an unflattering thing to admit in writing. It is also the most accurate sentence about why I booked. Working freelance from a German apartment, in your forties — the kind of slow social erosion that happens when most of your conversations are on a screen and most of your screens are about deliveries. I had clocked the problem. I had not done much about it. The booking at Pomar na Praia in Fuseta was, in retrospect, the doing-about-it.
The first week was the diagnosis. Three days of “I am here, I am eating dinner with strangers, this is fine.” Within a week the dinner table had stopped being strangers and started being people whose names I remembered without working at it. This sounds trivial. It is not trivial. The speed at which a halfway-functional coliving can convert “stranger” into “person I now have an in-joke with” is genuinely surprising and a little embarrassing to a German woman of a certain age who is supposed to have a more deliberate approach to friendship.
Week three is the week I extended my booking by another four weeks, with a single-line note to myself that gives the game away: “as i started to like being surrounded by these people.” No mention of the place. No mention of the food. People.
Week four was the first social handover. Half the cohort I had just learned the names of left. New people arrived. I had expected this to feel like a loss and it didn’t, quite — partly because the new arrivals were absorbed into the rhythm fast, partly because the people who had left had absorbed the rhythm before they did and the rhythm survived them. By week five I had a “dear friend” to say goodbye to on a Friday night out in Faro. By the end of week five I had extended again, until the end of the season.
Weeks six and seven are when the community management itself changed — first manager left with a homemade jam session, new manager arrived to cake — and the cohort kept going. It is hard to explain how surprising it is when an institution can change its main human and still feel like itself. Most of the social structures in my life cannot do this.
Week nine ran the experiment that proved the thesis. The building was full for a week and I moved into a Fuseta hotel. Same town, ten-minute walk from Pomar, all of my established habits available to me. Within three days the workout discipline was gone (see the fitness arc for the longer version of that collapse). Within five days I was eating dinner at the bar of a restaurant I would normally have eaten at with five people. What I wrote that week, lowercase and honest:
“No motivation for proper workouts, guess i need people around me for that.”
I was not, it turns out, a self-sufficient adult who chose to live with other people. I was someone whose habits ran on other people, full stop.
The retrospection line, which I had written half as a joke at the time, has held up: “People make great experiences, not awesome locations or perfect buildings.”
If you are weighing a long-stay coliving and your honest reason includes some version of “I have stopped being good at maintaining social connections,” I will tell you what I wish someone had told me. Yes, it works. Much faster than you expect. And the side effect is that you will discover exactly how dependent on the format you have become. Both halves of that are useful information.