HuMUS: Healthy Municipal Soils
The Healthy Municipal Soils (HuMUS) project is a European initiative under the EU Soil Mission, designed to empower municipalities and regions in protecting and restoring soil health. The project runs from 2024 to June 2025, with a specific focus on fostering sustainable soil management practices through collaborative governance and stakeholder engagement.
HuMUS aims to improve soil health in the municipality of Caravaca de la Cruz, with a particular focus on the Quípar Valley, an area facing severe degradation due to unsustainable agricultural and water management practices. The project seeks to diagnose key environmental and social challenges, engage local stakeholders, and develop a Territorial Management Agreement—a strategic framework to guide sustainable soil restoration efforts.
Key objectives
- Raising awareness – Increasing understanding of soil health among citizens, businesses, and local governments.
- Supporting policy implementation – Helping municipalities apply EU soil health strategies through participatory governance.
- Capacity building – Providing education and training to promote sustainable soil management. Developing local solutions –
- Co-creating and scaling practical approaches tailored to different land uses.
- Engaging stakeholders – Bringing together farmers, landowners, researchers, and public authorities to drive collective action.
Our role
As an active partner, the Regeneration Academy contributes to the stakeholder engagement process, ensuring that diverse actors—including farmers, policymakers, researchers, and youth—are involved in shaping the restoration strategy.
Our main responsibilities include:
- Facilitating participatory workshops to engage farmers and landowners in soil health discussions.
- Hosting educational programs at La Junquera to demonstrate regenerative practices.
- Coordinating field research and soil health assessments to provide data-driven insights.
- Developing the Territorial Management Agreement, a long-term framework for collaborative soil governance.
- Ensuring knowledge transfer and replication potential, so that successful strategies can be applied in other regions.
- By bringing together scientific research, practical implementation, and participatory governance, the HuMUS project represents a holistic approach to soil restoration. The insights gained in Caravaca de la Cruz will not only benefit the local ecosystem but also serve as a model for other European municipalities facing similar challenges.
TESTIMONIAL
FINN HARRIES
“I spent an amazing week at the Regenerative Academy in Murcia, Spain to complete a crash course in regenerative agriculture.
This is part of my research for my masters degree at Cambridge University. I loved learning the basics of soil health, water capture, food harvesting and composting. 🌱
The course is run on a massive 1,100 hectare farm that used to practice traditional industrial agriculture but now is leading the way in regenerative practices in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss.”
NATHALIE NAHAI
Where to start? I signed up for the Regeneration Academy’s one-week crash course, with the intention of gaining some practical knowledge and hands-on experience of what regenerative agriculture is, and how it can be used to restore ecosystems and food networks. In reality, it turned out to be so much more than this – it was one of the most transformative, memorable and joyful courses I’ve attended. The team was generous, open-hearted and welcoming, the food was a delight, and we came away feeling emboldened and optimistic as to the futures we can create when we work together towards a common goal. It was an extraordinary experience, and one which I can’t recommend highly enough.
RUBY & CHRISTABEL REED
The @regenerationacademy at @lajunquera are experimenting with, engaging in and researching regenerative agriculture in their 1700 hectare farm. They are brave and immensely inspiring, working at scale in one of the most impoverished parts of Spain where the land is being desertification by the climate and by conventional agriculture, as well as by the people and communities that used to inhabit it. This incredible community is proving that it is possible, even if not straightforward or simple, to transition to agricultural practices that revitalise both the planet and people. Last week we learnt about the power of context, complexity, culture and community 🌞🌻🥬”
Arno Foppe
My research project at La Junquera made me experience the reality of regenerative farming and gave me the opportunity to contribute to the next steps on the farm.
— Paulina Binsfeld - de Bus
“Doing my thesis at La Junquera has broadened my perspective on regenerative farming a lot. Because it is such a big farm, I got the opportunity to learn about all the different elements of regeneration, not just the agriculture part. Living here and seeing the day-to-day activities showed me that nothing is perfect, it’s a constant trial and error, not a pristine concept. I also learned a lot about what my role can be in a community and what elements I want to take with me when starting my own farm one day.””
Sofía and Pablo
In this course, we learned about the regenerative model, a model that proposes a paradigm shift in the current agricultural system and that involves the commitment and fight against the loss of biodiversity, climate change and desertification. Through small seminars, debates, and above all, visits to the field, one knows first-hand what day-to-day life is like in the field and how to make a living from the regenerative business.
The course is taught by professionals in the field, who are the living example of the wealth that is generated there. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to make a living from agriculture, for environmental researchers, or simply for curious people who want to rediscover nature
