what is camp spartel?
Jackson Great Housefall runs Camp Spartel, a six-day retreat in Tangier's medina for twelve creatives living together in two riads. You'll do Sufi chanting, visit the Hercules Caves, take a twelve-hour silent walk, and eat couscous by a lighthouse. Applications are open now.
Chapters
I think if you've been standing at the precipice of something for a while, looking to make a big change in your life, and you haven't, you know, given yourself that excuse and that permission to do it, this is your excuse. Hey, I'm Jackson Great Housefall, the founder and host of Camp Spartel. I've been traveling full-time for 2 years, and the first place that I ever visited outside of United States, Paris, kind of going back and forth, was Tangier, Morocco. The city changed my life. It's a true threshold city in so many ways. It's ancient and new, it's young and old, it's alive everywhere you look. So what is Camps Bartel? Well, it's 12 creatives getting together across 2 riads that we've booked right next to each other. So we've created a little compound right in the medina. Everyone's going to be living in close proximity with each other. We'll have breakfast together every morning, and we'll have dinner most nights. During the day, you're free to explore the city with each other or on your own. The goal is to get to know each other and ourselves by getting lost and by experiencing the world around us. And Tangier is the perfect city for that. The walled old city, the medina and the kasbah, are home to these snaky, interlocky, windy streets and alleyways alleyways that are very easy to get lost down. It's home to cafes and shops and restaurants, souks and stalls and little weird shops that you find yourself in. We'll be drinking lots of mint tea and eating lots of great food, and the food is going to be a really big part of this. You know, when I travel, I think part of what draws me to new places is experiencing the culture through the food. What we've organized is both dinners at the house and excursions into the world where we're all going to be sharing meals together. Now, it's not always going to be fancy meals. A lot of what Camp Spartacus is designed to bring out is a sense of discomfort. You know, a retreat— a retreat is what we do when we're losing a battle. This is not a retreat, and I hope we don't call it that. This is not for you if you're looking for a beach vacation or to unplug from the world and disconnect for a while. We are very much recharging by plugging into something new, the energy that we all bring to the space. The game plan for the week is pretty simple. Friday is a deeply spiritual religious day. We're going to go to the Sufi chanting night at the Hadra that evening. We're gonna have couscous because it's Friday. Couscous is what everyone does. On Saturday, we're taking a group trip out to the Hercules Caves. We're gonna have dinner at the lighthouse at Cap Spartel, which is where the camp gets its name from. Cap Spartel is the point where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. On Sunday, we're having a really weird lunch. I guarantee it's something that you've never eaten before, something you probably will never want to eat again. We're gonna do it together, and that's what matters. Then we're going out on a scavenger hunt through the Medina. On Monday, we're all going to the public hammam to get scrubbed down. It's a sandpaper baptism that will completely bifurcate and change your life. You will never see the world the same again. And our final day on Tuesday, we're capping it all off with a 12-hour walk. Now, this is a deeply reflective time where we will all leave our phones behind. We'll leave our AirPods and our music, and we will walk into the world with notebook and we'll walk for 12 hours. And when we come back at the end of the day, we'll all have our closing circle, dinner on the roof, and bid each other farewell. Into the world we go. I want this to be your permission slip to get out into the world and to make a change and to do something new, surrounded by a group of people who are all here for the same reason, who want to see each other succeed and thrive and try new things and to kind of level up in that way together. We have space for 12 people. It doesn't matter where you're coming from, what you do, who you are, what your background is. If this is something that calls to you, Fill out an application. I can't wait to meet you. So that's Camp Spartacus. It's 6 days right in the heart of the Medina of Tangier, the threshold city at the tip of Morocco, where we're going to go out into the city, explore, get lost, find ourselves, and make some really good friends in the process. If this sounds like something you're into, I can't wait to see you there.
