This shareholder-owned network of family homes across borders gives location-independent families dependable places to return to, beginning with a first village built in the Istrian countryside in Croatia.
Citadel.Garden is a network of private family homes conceived for location-independent families: households that can work, learn and live across borders, but still need dependable places to return to. Rather than each family buying and maintaining one isolated foreign property, the network is held in common by the families in it, who stay in whichever of its homes is free. What that participation involves is set out by the project itself.
Its premise is that a European passport already supplies the mobility special jurisdictions are built to create elsewhere, so the binding constraint on a freer life is rarely the right jurisdiction but continuity: families who leave to escape a schooling system or a tax regime can travel for years before their children begin to miss durable friendships, sport and the ordinary opportunities of a settled place. The answer it proposes is the multi-home pattern of wealthy households, at a scale a middle-class family can reach.
That scale rests on shared infrastructure rather than shared living: the stated minimum is roughly 25 families across the network, and rotation between homes becomes practical only once at least three locations exist. Families arrange their own movements, some staying for years, some for a season. Each place is meant to carry what its families have in common, among them workshops, agriculture and an approach to education that begins with unschooling.
One model that becomes possible over the years is that you spend three months of the year where you are from, to keep the cultural ties and the links to friends and family, then about two stretches of three months in European locations, and perhaps another three months outside Europe. And you can shift that. Rahim Taghizadegan, founder of Citadel.Garden
The first village stands in the Istrian countryside in Croatia, near enough to reach by car from central Europe; the second is on Madeira, the Atlantic island that fills the network’s EU special-zone circle, mild in climate and well served by direct flights. Three further circles reach into Europe beyond the Union and past the continent altogether, and those sites stay private until disclosure serves the network. The project takes no political part and claims no best jurisdiction, looking instead for places that are safe, well connected and good to live in. The name states the balance it wants: a citadel for resilience, a garden for life.
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What people ask
Where is Citadel.Garden?
Its first village is built in the Istrian countryside in Croatia, within driving distance of central Europe, and its second is on the Atlantic island of Madeira. The wider network follows five concentric jurisdictional circles, from the European Union outward to Europe beyond it and to bases beyond the continent.
Where are the next locations planned?
The third is to be in Europe outside the European Union and the fourth beyond the continent to the west, with Latin America, Asia, Africa and further European sites named as places being scouted. Beyond Croatia and Madeira the individual locations are kept private until disclosure serves the network.
Who is Citadel.Garden for?
Location-independent families, mostly European, who want both freedom of movement and dependable places to return to. Having a family is the limiting factor rather than any particular nationality, and the network is meant to be multi-generational; the membership began in the German-speaking countries and has grown more international over time.