3rd Mar CASTELO BRANCO

We’ve had a very busy day, we’ve viewed six properties ...................................... here’s a brief rundown of each:

Property 1: 18 acres, ok land, but no trees or vines. Big granite building, which could have made a lovely house. (48.500€)

Property 2: 13.5 acres fabulous land – lots of olive trees, fruit trees, vines, 2 huge vegetable beds (and the owner is still planting it up so you could tell it was fertile soil); a perfect balance between arable land and pasture – we can do everything we want to here. Block built house and sheds (for some reason estate agents don’t have the keys to buildings so we couldn’t see inside). The access however was not good, we had to park up our van and go in the agent’s car. (49,500€)

Property 3: 8.5 acres, ok land with olive and orange trees – would need to build a house. (68,000€)

Property 4: 10 acres very productive land with some woodland but tiny house and close to a road. (68,000€)

Property 5: 10 acres vines, olives, figs, very open land, lovely surrounding wall; again house too small but very cheap 42,000€ - sounds good on paper but Brett wasn’t ‘wowed’.

Property 6: 27 acres – the one we had been waiting to view all day!! Huge house, massive potential but too much money (for us) needed to realise it. Masses of land with orchards, vines, and olive trees. The land hasn’t been worked for several years, it’s been used to graze sheep. (70,000€)

Fortunately both of us agreed on a favourite property – no. 2; the land is absolutely perfect. The down side is the house; it’s a block built building and we need to arrange to go back so that we can see inside. The other problem is the access; we’ve been trying to imagine how we could get our furniture and possessions delivered – we’ve got to go and have another look.

So we’ve now had ten viewing and agreed on two possible – Monsanto (3 cottages + 3 acres) and Donkey Quinta (property 2), we call it that as there was a donkey tethered amongst the olive trees.

Driving back to the campsite was awful; I (as navigator) couldn’t remember exactly where it was so we asked Mrs Sat Nav for help, she took us round and round in circles and we ended up driving on the same stretch of toll road twice – now we’ve got to find out how to pay for it; there aren’t toll booths here, there are cameras that photograph number plates (similar to London I suppose).