(Beautiful) abandoned buildings in the north of Portugal. I’d love to know more about these or if there was a book on them (the style of buildings). I see a lot of them are being refurbished and the original structure is being respected. Saw one online for 1m€ (fully refurbished and 5000m of land).
by BrendanIrish
4 comments
1M im sure that´s a scam for turists… Hope nobody buys such a building with this land for 1 Million in a remote area. Dont feed these reckless house brokers and investors that are destroying our house market in Portugal.
So the history will most likely be different for each building, but a few do look like houses built in the late XIX and early XX century by Portuguese that emigrated to Brazil after it’s independence, became extremely wealthy, and then came back home and built somewhat ostentatious houses in their places of origin, called “Brasileiros de Torna viagem” for short, which I guess could be roughly translated as “Returning Brazilians”.
Maybe try running translate on [this site](https://www.almadeviajante.com/visitar-paredes-brasileiros-de-torna-viagem/) to learn more, as all I could find is in Portuguese.
Also, the first house kind of reminds me of the old time primary school buildings, built I think mostly in the 1930s to 1950s. With time you started to have fewer kids in isolated villages, so these old schools closed down and where in some cases [rehabilitated](https://rmcosta.pt/project/escolacondeferreira/) to other uses. You might see some like these, but I still think that the first house is not an old school, but rather a private house.
Idk about these ones in particular, but there’s a small beach town near Porto called Granja that has a lot of palaces / great houses, a lot of them abandoned, but most were owned by rich families and Aristocrats, some were British or descendents of British. Also some of the oldest golf courses in mainland Europe are in Espinho and Miramar and were also founded by those types of families.
These are sometimes referred to as Brazillian Houses, arquitetura dos brasileiros de torna-viagem. Expensive houses built by Portuguese that made big fortunes in Brazil in the 1800s.