📝 Detailed information
🏢 About the local organisation
People live in the commune of Pignans since the Antiquity. Numerous historical and religious monuments have been built here for centuries, including the Saint Andre Chapel.
For this first year of partnership, Pignans makes effort to be as much as possible welcoming in terms of accommodation, location and activities, with the will to make last this partnership for many years.
💼 What the programme involves
Pignans, small village at the heart of the Var Department, wants to restore a chapel located in the center of the old village. Come and join us to start this big project, and help to give back the Saint Andre Chapel its original beauty.
After many transformations over the centuries, the Saint Andre Chapel is today partly destroyed. In order to turn it into a central place in the village, a few years will be required. Several workcamps will thereby help the village to transform the current ruins into a multipurpose place, midway between a museum and an agora.
This first year will be mainly focused on the chapel\'s exterior walls: the point is essentially to clean and to repoint the stones with whitewash. For a varied work, a few tasks are also required inside of the chapel: clearing and levelling the ground on the open-side of the chapel, and removing some wooden elements from the other side.
🏠 Accommodation on site
For this first year of workcamp, participants will be accommodated in Pignans’ Abbey, in a dormitory. There are sanitary facilities and showers available.
The group will share the cleaning tasks and prepare meals together. The budget will be allocated to the group leaders, you will participate in the preparation of meals with good products from the market and local producers.
📍 About the location
Pignans is a 4.400 inhabitant’s village, located in Var, close to the Maures massif and halfway between Brignoles and the Côte d’Azur beaches. Many activities are available in this dynamic village, but also in the surroundings with a lot of hiking possibilities, sport activities and rivers trips from one end of the region to the other.
ℹ️ Additional information
Remember to bring clothes and shoes for work and hiking. Nights can be cool, even in the Abbey, so bring a sleeping bag for cold weather. To avoid mosquito bites, remember to bring mosquito repellent and long-sleeves and covering clothes for the evenings. As we are in an area where it can be very warm during the day, bring a hat or cap, sunglasses, sunscreen, a small backpack and water bottles.
For the public events, you can bring a few traditional things from home that are easy to carry with you.
Foreigners belonging to the European Union must bring with them a personal EHIC (European Health Insurance Card), and everybody must, in any case, bring their insurance certificate. If health issues happen on the project, volunteers will have to pay for it, and will then be reimbursed once back in their home country.
