1998 newspapers have been abandoned for years in the mailbox of an Algarve vacation house and only by chance were discovered.
The return of the mail brought a surprise to the diary of Coimbra. CTT returned two copies that had been sent 27 years ago to a subscriber in the Algarve.
The newspapers will have been to collect all these years in the recipient’s mailbox. An unusual situation revealed when the form of distribution of correspondence in the area has changed.
The newspaper received back, intact and to open, the two publications with news of the year of Expo 98.
“At first we were not even realizing what had happened,” says SIC João Luís Campos, deputy director of the Coimbra Diary. “We were unbelieving with the situation.”
The newspaper was sent to a subscriber who would be on vacation in the Algarve, something usual still today among the ten thousand subscribers of the Daily who often ask for signatures to be temporarily new to another address.
As a rule, the system works and when not something does not run well just a few days for the problem to be resolved. Not this time.
Both copies will have been sent to a post office of the Bela Praia Urbanization in Castro Marim, and only by chance they were discovered.
The works in the parking lot, scheduled for early August, brought to residents the warning that they would have to put new boxes at the door of the houses, since the space known as BRIC would be dismantled.
According to the CTT, the deactivation of these postcards was in a decision of the municipality.
The correspondence still present in the boxes was collected by the post office, including items with more than 20 years of seniority. Among them, the newspapers that were never raised by the recipient, who thus not knowing the news of Coimbra in August 1998.
CTT source confirmed SIC that newspapers are part of a batch of unfeed articles. It was under assessment its possible inclusion in the postal refuses auction, but was returned to the Diário de Coimbra.
