The Ruins
I am sitting at my kitchen table looking out the window at a view that continues to fascinate me, despite its totally mundane nature. The view is of an abandoned house, rather typical here in Portugal, and from this angle I see the more picturesque side of this particular ruin—an aging stucco wall, tiled roof, an artfully weathered blue shutter and some sort of hearty plant growing in a crack in the stone and plaster. This house is scarcely eight feet from the window, sitting across a narrow alley which runs past three inhabited houses (ours included) and at least seven ruins, before passing two barns, some chicken coops and then entering fields and olive groves. The ruins surrounding our house have been abandoned for decades, and such silhouettes are a common site all across this small Iberian country—they are in cities like Lisbon and Coimbra, towns like picturesque Aveiro and in villages like the one I currently call home.
There is something equally romantic and isolating about living surrounded by ruins and forsaken homes—something forlorn about views over collapsed rooftops and decaying walls—houses that seem now like planter boxes—homes for wild fig and whatever happens to be growing up through what was once someone’s kitchen or bedroom floor, strewn here and there with forgotten pieces of furniture or crockery, the arm of a lost doll or the fading cover of a book, all lost in the crush of invading plants. It is even more forlorn a feeling to be surrounded by such neighbors when one has spent the last twenty years living in cities where every building seemed full of people and, therefore, life. Add to this a year of pandemic enforced isolation and the scene begins to feel like the opening of a film (Bird Box and Children of Men come to mind).
The houses that are not abandoned seem to exist behind perpetually closed shutters, and even though the gardens and courtyards bloom with roses and hydrangeas and all manner of lilies, birds of paradise and fruit trees, the sealed shutters and closed doors seem as desolate as the dilapidated buildings. Of the two houses directly in front of the one in which I live (which was itself abandoned for twenty years), one is in better repair than at least eighty-five percent of the houses in the village. Its perfectly painted green shutters have opened exactly once in all of our months of being here—that was two nights ago when suddenly one window was opened for two hours, and the house seemed to fill up with people sharing some sort of celebration. Just as suddenly as the gathering came together, it disbanded, leaving behind the usual shuttered and silent building. We have taken to speculating on this house and the house behind us—are they summer homes? Investment properties from some absent well-heeled British investor? Did their elderly owners die, leaving them to disinterested children and grandchildren? Once, two months ago, we saw a realtor being shown the house with the green shutters by a middle-aged man who opened doors (but no shutters) during the visit. Was that middle-aged man the owner? Inheritor? Was the gathering the other night the final visit before this place is sold? Were they the new owners? Does the family use grannie’s old house as a place for once yearly dinners, dinners at which no one lingers for more than an hour?
Two of the three alleys surrounding our house have at least one inhabited home in them—all of those homes are closed off, with only the occasional sound of an opening or shutting door, perhaps a car coming or going. We do hear the elderly couple in one of them yelling at each other for a few minutes every few days—whether they are yelling out of irritation, habit or being hard of hearing we are not certain, as we know nothing of their dialect of Portuguese. The yelling though is the only sign that the house is occupied by anything but ghosts behind its gates and curtains and shutters, its perpetually closed windows and doors.
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One of the reasons for so many abandoned buildings is that the population is aging, and has been for a generation or two, and many of the homes belonged to people who either died or moved into assisted living facilities twenty or thirty years ago. Many of the young people who stood to inherit the property left in search of opportunities not available here (some 2.5 million Portuguese now live outside the country whose current population is 10.28 million). Wages in Portugal are well below the EU average, and the cost of maintaining an inherited property seems to have prevented their upkeep by those who remained in-country, while the extremely low property taxes have meant that selling them was of low priority. This combination of low incomes and low property taxes has meant that allowing buildings to rot away, becoming worth little more than the sale of the lot (not and exceptionally lucrative deal), is an easier decision than maintaining and listing the property, especially in all of the years before Portugal began to attract international attention and offer international tax incentives. In the northern city of Porto it is estimated that around twenty percent of the structures in the city’s historic district are abandoned, slowly falling apart and becoming not only harder to present as a worthwhile investment, but a growing danger to surrounding buildings. What this will mean for an historic city center in the coming years is up for speculation—all that can be known in the present is that the city would like to enhance its appeal to tourists, and hiding an eye sore is more of a priority than figuring out what to do with the eye sore in the absence of someone willing to buy a four story building with no floors and no roof.
Portugal’s days as a world power ended centuries ago and following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, what remained of the overseas colonial empire was relinquished back to the involuntarily colonized. Since then, the country has weathered the ebbs and flows of capitalism and post-dictatorship modernization, facing the same challenges as similarly poor countries like Greece. Since the 1970s these countries have enjoyed being tourist destinations, their beaches prized by Europe’s more monied travelers—but that has resulted in little longterm investment, and slow adaptation to the rapid technological advances of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and while some of the cities have revitalized and made themselves more appealing to visitors, that has not translated in widespread prosperity.
I was recently talking to a man who drives Uber for a living. He was born not far from here only a few days after the 1974 revolution that ended the Salazar regime. After finishing University in Lisbon, he stayed in the city for twenty years before returning to the region he came from to pursue a pastoral life as a goat farmer. For several years he was doing alright, he and his three-hundred goats. He got by selling goat milk on a limited local scale, to markets and cheese makers. Then came the devastating fire season of 2017. The day the fires destroyed his farm, he lay down next to his car, surrounded by the blaze, unable to escape, unable to call for help, unable to save a single structure, waiting there with his dog to die. Somehow, the next day, his farm was destroyed, three quarters of his goats were dead but he and the dog remained alive. I asked him if he planned to return to farming. “No”, he said “there’s no opportunity there. The EU likes to keep us out of the market—they want Portugal as a beach resort, not a competitor in agriculture. France, Spain and Italy grow the same things—so we can only grow for ourselves. They sell to our grocery stores, we can only sell at the market”. He was not fatalist or morose in explaining this—only matter of fact. He is as old as the country and has seen it rise slowly, year after year as an increasingly favored tourist destination—watched it pursue the courses of action that so many other cities and states over the last thirty or forty years have pursued, resulting in economies dependent on tourism and catering more and more to short term visitors, and less and less to full-time residents. Now he will continue to drive for Uber, hoping he can do that for another ten years before retiring on what will be a limited pension.
I read this morning in The Portugal News, an English language daily, that in Lisbon, the country’s capitol, it is luxury real estate that is attracting foreign investment, mostly from France, UK, Brazil, Germany and China. For the last several years there was a featured program called the Golden Visa that expedited residency visas and promoted tax breaks and incentives for those investing over 500,000 euros in real estate. While this scheme has netted money for the economy and residency for investors, it has not resulted in occupied homes or new residents interested in integrating into life in Portugal. Most of those properties sit empty, sheltering money from being taxed in other countries, and while the investment in luxury properties does bring in money from property sales, those sales remain a limited source of income (remember, property tax is comically low). The investors will not be living here year-round, will not be buying groceries, home goods, new clothes or requiring other services the way a permanent resident would. They will not be buying their stamps from the Portuguese post-office, nor will they be visiting local markets or stores for basic items like tooth paste, light bulbs and coffee. They will not be patronizing the local bistros, cafes and restaurants, will not be going to the hair dresser, gym or cinema, and they will not be welcoming visiting friends and family to their homes, helping net another small investment of short-term visitor cash into the pool of the tourist economy.
These are all of the things I think while sitting here, drinking my morning coffee, purchased from our village general store, looking at notes in a notebook made in Portugal that I picked up at the papelaria in town and gazing on the stuccoed walls and fading blue shutter across the alley, bathed in morning sun—a small but vivid portrait of this country I now call home.