We are Luca from Italy and Christin from Germany.
Luca was born in Turin in 1992, grew up there and finished school there. Before the project, he was mostly travelling and worked in many different countries in many different jobs, e.g. as a photographer, as a musician, as a craftsman and in hostels. So he is an absolute multi-talent.
Christin, born in Schwalmstadt (Hessen) in 1987, studied business management and tourism and event management after her A-levels and then worked in revenue management for several major airlines and Deutsche Bahn for almost a decade. Despite starting a classical career, however, Christin has always felt drawn to nature and wanted to make her life more ‘meaningful’, with a strong need to do ‘something good’.
We met in Lisbon in June 2017, when Luca was playing music in the streets of Lisbon with a friend and Christin was on holiday there with her mother. Through a CD we bought, we stayed in touch and travelled a lot together in the following years.
At that time, Christin already had the idea of founding a sanctuary for animals. During our travels together, we both understood (even more) how important it is to do something for the environment quickly. So we decided to combine animal welfare and environmental protection and to get started soon.
In January 2020 we arrived in Sicily to look at a few plots of land and in June 2020 we finally signed the contract for a plot of land of about 2.5 hectares on which the AlmaGea project may now become reality.