When You Inadvertently buy 10 Properties in Portugal...

I came to Portugal in the spring of 2022 looking for a small house to rent or buy so I could qualify for a long stay visa.

Leading up to that trip, I’d fallen in love with several I’d seen online and passed many delightful hours moving into and re-decorating each one in my mind, fantasizing about the wonderful dinners and glasses of wine I would have on sunset terraces.

And then I came across one that wiped the others right out of my head – a small villa in a rural setting with charming gardens, stones walls, a 100-year-old mill house, a stream running through the property, an outdoor kitchen, and a couple of old barns.

All this just twenty minutes away from one of the largest cities in Portugal. Best of all? It was – unbelievably – in my price range.

Head over heels in love, I called the realtor, then booked a flight to arrive in Portugal ten days later. I visited the house in person May 25th and made an offer May 26th. It was accepted May 27th.

That was the fun part. But what I thought would be a simple act of buying a small house soon morphed into a Portuguese game of virtual Monopoly – a multinational effort involving British sellers, a Portuguese lawyer, a Portuguese double agent (representing both sides of the deal), an Australian inspector, a stranger in France – and me, now back in America and working on my visa.

At the suggestion of my real estate agent, I hired a wonderful female Portuguese lawyer to help me through the process. Once the offer was accepted, the next step was the creation of the CPCV, or promissory note. I was surprised when this ended up taking quite some time.

When I eventually received a copy of it, several weeks later, I was shocked to learn the reason for the delay. I was not buying just one property, but ten.

Ten!

Even though the total size of the property is less than an acre, each little building and every little bit of garden has its own tax record and property description, some dating back to days of yore. And each one had to be painstakingly verified according to contemporary regulations.

Ten properties.

And that was just the first surprise.

[To be continued…]

Original art by Kristin Fellows