Alex Jurj
A Romanian permaculture practitioner, natural builder and off-grid systems designer who bought 7 hectares near Cluj in 2015 and has been building on it since, in public.
- Founder of the SolarPunk Homestead and the MetanoiaGrow project at Șardu, Cluj county, roughly 20 km from Cluj-Napoca, at about 450 metres elevation.
- Bought the land in 2015. His own account: he was city-raised, went into horticulture thinking about a walnut business, then read Sepp Holzer and Bill Mollison and changed course. He lived in a tent for three months, dug an earthbag cellar, and sold an apartment in Cluj to fund the land.
- The site is 7 hectares, of which he describes about 3 as intensively worked.
- Buildings and systems: a half-buried clay-and-straw house, a "Hobbit House" of earthbag and cob built in 2019, an "Earthship House", mushroom projects, vegetable gardens and a food forest. Methods used across the site include cob, earthbags, straw bale, cobwood, tyre walls and clay plaster. Power is solar, water is rainwater with natural filtration.
- He keeps chickens, rabbits, ducks, geese, a donkey and dogs alongside the gardens and fruit.
- His YouTube channel @AlexJurj has around 23,000 subscribers and over a thousand videos. The best-performing has passed 100,000 views.
- The strongest independent coverage is a 2024 ARTE documentary that travelled to Romania to film the project; he has also been covered by the Romanian TV channel Kanal D and by the farming network Eco Ruralis.
The work
The homestead itself
2015 to now · Șardu, ClujThe actual project
This is the part worth paying attention to. Seven hectares of Romanian hillside, worked without grid connection, built out of the materials on it. Reading through a decade of his own footage, the sequence is legible: tent, cellar, cob, earthbag, straw, food forest. He films the failures as well as the finished buildings, which is why the channel is useful. His own summary from 2021 is the most honest thing on the subject: almost nothing is finished; many things started and unfinished.
Teaching and hospitality
Commercial activityWhere the money comes from
The homestead runs as a business as well as a farm. He sells a "Rent a Farm Experience" at roughly €58, €143 and €480, longer seven-day natural building workshops run with a co-teacher, consulting work, a "Work as Therapy" programme, volunteering places at around €10 a day for food, an Airbnb, a Patreon and a donation channel. MetanoiaGrow is registered as a farming business in Cluj since 2018.
The channel and the writing
YouTube · blog · talksHow the work gets out
A thousand videos across natural building, off-grid tour, permaculture, foraging and long quiet build sequences. Around twenty-four written posts on his own blog between 2023 and 2026. Interviews on the MCN Podcast, Radio Vocea Evangheliei, and in the French design school d.school Paris, which analysed one of his videos. The ARTE film is the one piece of reporting that did not simply repeat his own numbers.
His version of solarpunk
PositionOptimism as a technique
He defines solarpunk as a philosophy and a call to action rather than a genre: renewable energy plus regenerative community, with an emphasis on refusing despair. In practice what he actually does is permaculture, natural building and off-grid living under a solarpunk name. That gap is worth naming honestly. The d.school Paris analysis puts his video at the rural-sobriety end of the neo-rural pole, which is a fair description of the work.
One factual correction: he dates the origin of solarpunk to 2011. The movement traces to 2008, when a blog post coined the term. The rest of what he says about it is consistent with the movement's own literature.
Where he runs into trouble
- We found no disputes, no allegations of fraud, and no trouble with authorities. That is a genuinely clean sheet, and we are reporting it as one rather than manufacturing a section. Anyone looking for a scandal here will not find one, and we would rather say so than pad the page.
- The real issue is the gap between the claims and the record. "Self-sufficient" and "off-grid" sit alongside a paid teaching business, paid stays and a donation channel. Both can be true at once, but the honest framing is that this is a working demonstration farm that earns its money by teaching, and that is a different thing from a household that feeds itself. His line that the only bill is internet is his own and we could not verify it.
- "Eco-village" overstates what is there. He increasingly markets the project that way, but the evidence shows a single-owner homestead where one person does the building and hosting. A village implies residents. There are not any.
- There was one critical discussion worth recording. A thread in the solarpunk community questioned the use of generated imagery in the ARTE film and in some of his own social posts, which sits awkwardly with a project whose whole claim is that the real thing exists and can be filmed. We could not read the thread itself, only its summary, so we are noting it rather than drawing a conclusion.
What the record shows
Where the evidence is thin
This is the most important section on this page. Read it before you take any number above as measured.
- Almost the entire record is self-published. His figures on acreage, years off-grid, what is built, and how complete it is all originate with him. Outlets that cover the project, including some in Romania, repeat his numbers rather than auditing them.
- What is independently corroborated: the location, confirmed separately by Eco Ruralis in 2021 and Kanal D in 2024; the 2015 start; the ARTE film, which put a crew on the ground in 2024; and the subscriber count, which is verifiable from outside his channel.
- What is not corroborated anywhere but his own channels: the 7 hectares; the 3 intensive hectares; the number of buildings completed; how far off-grid the site actually is; and the "eco-village" framing. The ARTE film is the only independent camera that has been there, and it is a seventeen-minute piece.
- Two claims we could not verify and have left out. A "10+ years" framing of the project is close enough to 2015 to be fair, but his statement that roughly 80 per cent of the build was done alone is entirely self-reported. We also found no source connecting the Instagram handle we started from to him with certainty, so we have not cited it.
- Our advice to a reader: treat everything above as a claim made by the person doing the work, in public, with a camera running for ten years. That is more evidence than most homesteads produce and less than a survey. It is enough to watch and learn from, and not enough to benchmark against.
Our take
We farm 4.6 acres on a hillside in West Virginia that was timbered before we got it. Jurj has seven hectares in Cluj and a decade more time in than us. When he says almost nothing is finished, that is a sentence we recognise from our own place, and it is the reason we trust the rest of what he says more than we would otherwise.
The solarpunk label does some work that we are not sure it earns. What he is doing is permaculture and natural building, the same tradition our grandparents' neighbours practised without a name for it. We like the optimism and we are suspicious of branding. A thing worth doing usually does not need to be sold as a movement.
What we take from him is practical. Build with what is on the ground. Dig before you buy. Show the parts that failed. And treat "enough" as a design constraint, which is what off-grid living actually enforces: you stop adding circuits when the panel stops paying for them.
He is included here because we think the useful half of solarpunk is the half that gets built. He has the shovel. We are watching.
Sources
- Alex Jurj, YouTube channel. Subscriber count and video count, and the channel's own links out to his site and professional profile. His build and off-grid claims are stated across the video archive.
- Alex Jurj, MetanoiaGrow — about and the solarpunk essay. Source for his own account of the 2015 purchase, the 7 hectares, the apartment sale, the tent and cellar, and his definition of solarpunk including the 2011 date we correct on this page.
- "Workshop SolarPunk: Natural building, Permaculture, Off-grid System". His own channel description, used for the methods named on this page.
- Eco Ruralis, interview, 2021. Independent corroboration of the location and the 2015 start, and the source of his own admission that almost nothing is finished. Also the origin of the tent, the earthbag cellar and the apartment sale.
- ARTE Tracks, "De Miyazaki à la vraie vie", 2024, directed by Hajar Ouahbi. A seventeen-minute film on the project and the strongest independent coverage that exists. It is also the only independent camera to have visited, which is the basis for the limits set out above.
- Alex Jurj, professional profile, and MetanoiaGrow's company record. Source for the 2015 start, the Cluj location and the 2018 founding of the business. Self-described, and labelled as such.
- Playboard, channel statistics. Third-party mirror of the subscriber count, used because it is the one figure we could corroborate outside his own channels.
- Prices for the farm experience, workshops, volunteering and stays are taken from his own booking pages at metanoiagrow.com and are quoted as of publication. They are commercial self-descriptions and should be treated as such.