The site is nestled in the scrubland to the west of Montpellier. At the end of a rocky path, we discover imposing wooden constructions: on seven hectares, three buildings house a 1,500 m2 workshop2 and 500m2 of offices. Outside, a few chairs around a construction reel converted into a table for a coffee corner. Here are brought together the activities of eight organizations, four associations and four cooperatives, under an umbrella structure, Macondo, the name that the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave to the mythical village of his novel A hundred years of solitude.
In front of the main building, on a billboard, are pinned the logos of those who have, at one time or another, supported the project: the Occitanie region, the metropolis of Montpellier. And even the State through different structures, of the Environment and Energy Management Agency at Bpifrance, the public investment bank.
In total, Macondo received nearly a million euros in subsidies in six years, which allowed it to construct the buildings, buy a minibus, and design and equip the collective carpentry workshop. Latest success to date: at the end of 2023, Macondo received the “Proximity Manufacture” label granted by the State via the national agency for territorial cohesion. The prize is 250,000 euros. Today, twenty-seven people are employed on the site and the young people who come to train there easily find work in the booming sector of ecological construction professions.
Questioning the building permit
It all started in a modest way. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Mas Dieu site, in this town of Montarnaud (4,000 inhabitants), was considered to host the ultimate waste storage center for the Montpellier urban community. The area’s elected officials are fighting to prevent this from happening, highlighting respect for the landscape, talking about installing a shepherd, creating hiking trails, etc. Photovoltaic shade structures have been installed there.
Finally, Benjamin Clouet, creator of SCOP Ecosec, which manufactures dry toilets, arrived in 2018 with the Macondo project, which brings together several structures, thus providing a response combining economy and consideration of environmental issues. The town hall, then headed by Gérard Cabello (PCF), signed a thirty-two-year construction lease in 2020, which allowed Macondo to settle in against the promise of returning everything to the town hall in the long term. Support is coming to help this project keep up with the times.
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