In our heads it was simple; we offer the asking price, they accept, boom, job done.

And although that did happen, a few other things managed to slow down that simplicity. The next day we met Carla and the Solicitor in her office in Grandola, did some legal stuff and discussed the PIP.

Yes PIP. It gives you permission to build on a certain piece of land and is needed to be applied for and granted before the sale could go through. The application for it had already gone in so it was just a matter of waiting. No one imagined there would be a problem as the seller had lived in a house on the land years ago, and in order to build, there needs to be an existing building, even if it is a ruin.

So, we return to the UK and wait, but the world is enveloped in the disaster of Covid, everyone works from home and the PIP grinds to a halt. For the next few months, I work on a design for the house based on the hope that the 50m rule has a small amount of flexibility. You see the land is only 108m wide at its widest point, so we are looking at an 8m wide house that is 80m long. It is a compromise as the original concept was four buildings each providing for an activity; sleep, eat, live and work and all linked with an ever-decreasing roof that surrounded a garden.

8 months later and the PIP arrives: it isn’t good news. The Camara have decided that the ruin does not exist because no one can find it and all that is visible is some rubble that could have been dumped there. We know it is there and we just need to prove it, so the first task is to understand the rules of engagement.

My dates and sizes might be slightly out, but the basis of the many rules goes like this. To build a house of up to 500 sq/m you need to have a plot of around 4/5 hectares or more.  Great we have 7 hectares. There needs to have been a house registered with the Camara on the land before around 1953.  Great we have that. The house needs to still exist even if it is a ruin, although there is no definition of a what a ruin is. Now this is a tricky one as all we have is rubble. So, we set to trying to prove everything and the first suggestion we get is to find an arial photograph from before 1953. Apparently, lots of houses were built after 1953 without permission so if we have one of those we are sunk. It turns out that the RAF photographed all of Europe after the end of WW2 – ‘Brilliant!’, I thought, and most of the photographs have been digitised and are on the web. Except Portugal. I can tell you the name of the plane, the date of the photograph, the mission number but I can’t see the photo and because of Covid everything has shut down. And that last rule is that you cannot build within 50m of your boundary; possible but quite thin.

Our focus is now on the photo and there is a government agency in Lisbon who has all the arial photos you could want; you apply online and two months later your official photo appears in the post. It was a great day when it arrived. Surely this was what we needed?

No, it wasn’t. You see the PIP said different things to different people; the seller’s solicitor said we couldn’t build a house, very honest of them.  Our solicitor said we could build a house and it all centred around the punctuation. Oh, the power of a comma! Never, ever underestimate the power of a comma.

As I said at the start, this land was ours, it was written. So, in fact none of this mattered, it had been a year now and everyone wanted some movement with the contract, so we signed a contract to buy and paid a 20% deposit. A more cautious or pessimistic person would say that we had just paid a lot of money for some trees but to us we had bought our future home.

There really was no going back now so we chatted endlessly about the different options that had come up in conversation over the year. There were three categories of build: a house, a farm and hospitality. The house was the ideal but this option – although the ideal – posed the most obstacles and the most limitations on the house design. The farm appeared simple as the distance from the boundary for building purposes was less. You need to submit a proposal showing how your farm will exist and it was at this point – please do not judge us too harshly – that we discovered that pine nuts come from pine trees! Honestly, I am not kidding, they are in the pinecones, and we have a lot of pine trees. Unfortunately, not enough trees to make a living but it was a start. So, what other things can we grow? Oranges sound good but apparently you can’t give them away. Tomatoes, too much work. Grapes for wine, too much investment. Farming isn’t that easy, is it? A client of Ronald’s had been on a similar journey, and they’d planted rows and rows of lavender. Not only did this seem to raise enough money but it also looked incredible – immaculate rows of lavender in amongst the pine trees. This was the plan. The land is long –  887m long – so the end of the land could be for lavender! Problem solved.

We set a date for the completion of the sale. Letters were sent to the neighbours giving them the option to buy the land. You must do this apparently. The offer is that they pay the same price and complete by the same date. It’s unlikely to happen but it gives you a few nervous weeks. The completion date arrived and no one else had offered to buy the land. This was it; we get to finally own the dream!

STOP! We are missing an important document. You must be joking! It’s been 15 months now. What can we possibly not have? I refer you back to the start of the process, the bit where Covid arrived and the processing of documents by the Camara went from slow to unbelievably slow. We apparently need an energy certificate for the ruin, the ruin that the Camara says does not exist but is now producing an energy certificate for. My guess is that it isn’t terribly energy efficient, but we must wait and see. Two months later and the document arrives, and a new date is set. We can’t make it over as travel is banned so our solicitor is given the power to sign on our behalf.

The day comes –  the 8^th July at 11.30 and everyone is there; our solicitor, their solicitor, Carla and the family who are selling the land. We are minutes from being the owners.

STOP! The document giving the neighbours the right to buy has the wrong date on it! If we go ahead there would be the possibility that in a year, 2 years, even 5 years we could have a knock at the door and our neighbour would have the right to buy everything for the price we paid for the land. The purchase is delayed again, the two solicitors rightfully get an earful from the vendors and new letters are sent out. We hold our breath – you never know – one of the neighbours may have come into some money.

They didn’t come into money and yet another date is set for the 23^rd July.  Surely nothing can go wrong or be left to do? As we thought we would already own the plot we had booked a week in Melides to potter around our land and smile at everyone possible. We went out anyway and it was a little strange walking on the land knowing that we didn’t actually own it, but we met one of the neighbours, a lovely lady called Isabel who thankfully speaks fluent English. It is a constant embarrassment that my Portuguese is so bad and even more of an embarrassment that we have been trying to learn from an app and it turns out we had been the wrong Portuguese. Apparently, there is Brazilian Portuguese. Who knew?