Pomar has its own farm. You pick the avocados yourself.

The word pomar in Portuguese means orchard. I had assumed, before I booked, that this was a poetic flourish — the kind of name a coliving brand picks for atmosphere — and the website was not aggressive about correcting me. Two fruit-picking afternoons confirmed otherwise. Twice across thirteen weeks, in week one and again in week seven, the same matter-of-fact line went into my notes: “Orange and Avocado picking on Pomar’s own Farm during the week.”

The property does, in fact, have its own farm. The fruit on the breakfast terrace some weeks was the fruit that the cohort had carried back in baskets the day before. This is the kind of thing that would have been a marketing centerpiece at a five-star hotel and is, at Pomar, a Tuesday afternoon.

A few honest notes:

• The farm is not enormous. It is a working orchard the property maintains, and the picking afternoons are roughly seasonal — what fruit you get depends on when you are there.
• The picking is voluntary, the picking is enjoyable, the picking is also somewhat hard on your back if you are a German woman of a certain age who has not bent down to ground level recently. I survived. My back filed a complaint that lasted forty-eight hours.
• The fruit that does not get eaten on the day finds its way into the kitchen — into smoothies, into salads, into a memorable avocado-on-toast week.

The deeper point is unromantic: a coliving with its own orchard is, structurally, a coliving with a built-in reason to spend a Tuesday afternoon outdoors with the cohort doing something that is neither work nor leisure but a third category. Most colivings do not have a third category. Pomar does.

If the operational name means what it says, you should at least know what you are paying for.