Done the castles? This valley has been busy for 400,000 years

There is a question I hear on almost every viewing trip, usually around day three. We have seen a castle, walked a medieval town, eaten far too well. Then someone asks, so what do people actually do here? Not everyone wants to hike, especially in the summer heat, and not everyone is a beach person. It is a fair question, and this month central Portugal handed me a brand new answer.

On 8 July the town of Torres Novas opened a new archaeology museum called Cerca da Vila. The star exhibit is a human skull. Not a medieval one, not even a Roman one. This skull is around 400,000 years old.

It was found in 2014 in the Gruta da Aroeira, a cave near the spring of the river Almonda, where research teams have been digging for more than thirty years. It is the oldest human fossil ever found in Portugal and one of the oldest anywhere in western Europe. The people who left it behind were shaping stone tools, and the cave holds some of the earliest evidence in Europe of humans using fire. Until this summer the skull had never been shown to the public. Now you can stand in front of it in a quiet museum in a market town most foreign buyers have never heard of.

Grutas de. Lapa

A couple of kilometres away it gets stranger. The village of Lapas looks like any other village in the region, whitewashed houses and narrow streets. Underneath it runs a labyrinth of tunnels, cut by hand into the soft tufa stone the village sits on. Nobody knows for certain when the digging started. A burial chamber found there in 1935 held remains about five thousand years old. The Romans quarried the stone. Local stories talk of Moors, and of early Christians hiding underground. I build for a living, and I take my hat off to whoever cut those galleries with hand tools.

You can visit, follow the marked trail through the village, then go down into the caves themselves.

Here is the thought I keep coming back to. The valley country between the Mondego and the Tejo has held onto people for 400,000 years, from that skull in Torres Novas to the families living above the tunnels of Lapas today. No place manages that by accident. There is water all year, limestone that is easy to build with, valleys that shelter you from the worst of the weather, and land that feeds you. The exact same things that make life comfortable here now.

So when someone asks me what there is to do in central Portugal once the castles are ticked off, I have plenty to say. Museums holding some of the oldest human remains in Europe. Caves dug by hands nobody can name. And that is before we get to the markets, the river beaches and the food. This region has something to suit almost every taste. If you are wondering whether it would suit yours, I'm just a call away.

What Phil and Kirstie were actually selling

For twenty-five years, the British public has watched Location, Location, Location without quite noticing what the show is about.

Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp are not estate agents. They are buying agents, sometimes called property finders, hired by the buyer to be on the buyer's side.

Phil founded his own property search company, Garrington, back in 1996, and today it is the largest buying agency in the UK. Every episode is a demonstration of a real service that anyone can hire. Most viewers never twig.

The numbers bear this out.

A YouGov survey found that 69% of British buyers have never considered using a buying agent, mostly because they have never heard of one or do not know anyone who has.

Nearly half of UK adults believe that estate agents work for both sides.

They do not.

The estate agent is paid by the seller and works for the seller, full stop.

America sees it differently: 88% of buyers there purchase through their own agent, and going into the biggest purchase of your life without someone in your corner is considered odd. Here it is normal.

Developers and investors worked all this out long ago. They use sourcers and search agents as a matter of course, because the best opportunities rarely make it onto the portals and because a good finder pays for himself.

It is ordinary buyers, the people with the most at stake and the least experience, who go in alone.

Now move that picture to Portugal, where the paperwork is in a language you cannot read, the regions all blur into one on a map, and the estate agent showing you a quinta in the sunshine is doing his job, which is to sell it to you.

People assume the point of hiring a property finder is that I find you a house faster. The speed is the least of it.

What you are really paying for is everything around the house. After one proper conversation, I can usually match a person to a property at a glance, because I know these villages and the life each one offers, which valley holds the morning fog, where the neighbours will adopt you and where they will watch you politely from a distance for a decade.

I know where the town hall paperwork runs smoothly and where it crawls, and the shortcuts when a document that officially takes three months is needed rather sooner.

And after more than three decades in construction, I can stand in front of a house and tell you what that crack above the window actually means, whether the barn can honestly become a guest cottage, and roughly what the works will cost. That is the difference between buying a house and buying the right house.

Sometimes my honest opinion is to walk away.

That is the whole point of having someone on your side. Nobody selling you something will ever say it.

So that service you have been watching on Channel 4 all these years exists here in Portugal, and it is not reserved for the wealthy or the investors.

It is for anyone who would rather not gamble their retirement fund on a sunny afternoon and a charming agent. If you want to talk about what that looks like for your own search, I'm just a call away.

JP

Portugal's new property tax: who it stings and who barely notices

Portugal has changed the rules for foreign buyers, and the headlines make it sound worse than it is.

From 1 September this year, anyone who is not a Portuguese tax resident pays a flat 7.5% transfer tax (IMT) when they buy a home here. No progressive bands, no main-residence relief. Sign the deed before that date, and the old rules still apply.

So what does it actually cost? Take two couples, both British, both looking at a €350,000 house in Portugal.

The first couple want a holiday home. They will adhere to the 90-day-in-180-day rule and remain UK tax residents.

From September, their IMT bill is €26,250, plus 0.8% stamp duty of €2,800. Call it €29,000 in tax before the lawyer has sent an invoice.

The second couple are moving here for good, retiring on the D7 visa with their state and private pensions. As residents buying their main home, they stay on the progressive scale and pay around €16,000 on the same house.

Same house, same price, roughly €10,000 less tax. And because they draw the UK state pension, the S1 form covers their healthcare through the Portuguese system, paid for by the UK, so they are not funding private health insurance year after year either.

Even the holiday couple have a way back. You pay the 7.5% upfront, and if you become a Portuguese tax resident within two years, you can claim the difference back from the tax office.

Here is the part the headlines miss. At the prices most of my readers actually buy at, the new rule barely registers.

Residents buying a main home pay no IMT at all if the property price is below €106,346.

On a €150,000 little quinta, a resident couple pays under €900. A non-resident pays €11,250 at the new flat rate, which stings, but it is a long way from the €26,000 horror story.

And rustic property (farmland, olive groves, that scruffy terrain that comes with every quinta) is not touched by the new rule at all. It stays at a flat 5% for everyone, as it always has.

Then there is my favourite corner of the market: the renovation project. Buy a property over 30 years old, or one in a designated urban rehabilitation area, commit to doing it up properly within three years, and the IMT can disappear entirely. The building works are charged at 6% VAT instead of 23%.

One more thing on running costs.

The annual property tax (IMI) is charged on the taxable value the finance office holds for the property, not what you paid. That value usually sits well below the market price, so a modest country house often costs a few hundred euros a year, not thousands.

Also, only major renovations are supposed to be declared and can trigger a revaluation, but it is rarely the number that breaks a budget.

And the comparison with home? A £150,000 retirement house in the UK pays no stamp duty at all, which sounds like a win until you look at what £150,000 buys within reach of anything. Around a main town

, €150,000 still gets you a solid stone house with land, fruit trees and room for the grandchildren to get gloriously lost.

The rules moved, the sums changed, and the right answer depends entirely on what you are planning: holidays, retirement or a project. None of this is tax advice, and the fine print is exactly why you want a good Portuguese lawyer before you sign anything. But if you want to talk through what the new rules mean for your own plans, you know where I am. I'm just a call away.

JP