Locked Up
The first COVID-19 lockdown keeps us in our house and garden for some months. Luckily, we have found a house to stay for a while with garden in the middle of beautiful nature. We don’t meet a lot of new people, and our plans to explore Portugal stagnate. We just work in the garden and clean the house of another family because there is nothing else to do.
In May, we feel the need to do something; this stagnation doesn’t sit well with us, so we decide to act again: we will visit houses. After living in Portugal and seeing different places, we know that the location south of Coimbra is our place to look for our home. It’s not too warm like the South, not too rainy like the North of Portugal, and close to a big city Coimbra.
We search online and visit some houses, a few in a short time. It’s not very efficient, but what is here? The agencies just show us one house—the one we saw on the internet or on the street—and that’s it. We never hear from them again. It seems like they don’t want to sell property.
Visiting More Houses
All the houses have something we don’t like, such as noise from a highway, train, or factory, a strange interior, or close neighbors. How can we find more properties? Searching only online, in our experience, does not work. Then we meet Clara. She is from the agency Century 21, and she does not stop showing us more houses. She keeps sending us pictures of houses. On the first day, she shows us three houses. The days after, she shows us more. We like her proactiveness.
The location where she works, Penela, is not quite where we want to live. We ask her for a house next to the pilgrim route to Santiago. The next day, she takes us to a place just outside her region, and we see the pilgrim path just across the house. It is so quiet: Jaap-Willem immediately notices that you could hear a pin drop. This is exactly what he is looking for. And the view? Excellent. We continue are search but we know already that we have found what we are looking for.
Reactions of people are: “This is a postcard.” “This is a pearl, a hidden gem”.
