From the parish of Ajuda, in Lisbon, to the city of Leiria, the Grande Reportagem Aqui Já Vivia Gente exposes the portrait of a public real estate heritage marked by abandonment, emptiness and political ineffectiveness.
For 20 years, successive governments have intended to inventory State properties. Since 2007, attempts to catalog and register public property have been frustrated.
Estamo, which took over the inventory and management of public assets in 2023, states that there are 60 thousand properties, but of these, how many are vacant or unused? Should they help respond to the housing crisis?
Three buildings
They have discreet dimensions, colors and architecture. So discreet that they could imagine they were still alive, if it weren’t for the locked door, the paper notice alerting them to the new address, the rusty air conditioning units and the misaligned blinds.
In Lisbon there are three unoccupied buildings (there are many more), since they stopped functioning as family health units. The former USF Oriente, in Beato, is located on Avenida Afonso III. An eight-story building that, like many other health centers, was adapted to serve the public. It closed its doors with the inauguration of the new facilities at the Beato Health Unit.
The old Lumiar Health Center, at 243 Alameda das Linhas de Torres, has an identical history, which has also been unoccupied since the new Alta de Lisboa Health Unit opened its doors.
The third building, located in Travessa das Florindas, in Ajuda, was also created with a housing function, but since the USF left there in 2023, it has been locked and unoccupied, despite its eight floors on the left and right.
Jorge Marques, the president of the Ajuda Parish Council, says that the housing crisis is an emergency, but “it doesn’t spill blood and that’s why it’s always a postponed problem”.
The mayor of Ajuda and Beato’s counterpart are, like all mayors, the first bell that customers ring in need of food, help to pay their water and electricity bills and a solution to find a house.
“Every week we have cases of people coming to us”, said the mayor of Beato, Silvino Correia, when he met with three families from the parish who were awaiting the results of the Programa Renda Acessível competition. Difficulties they face and which make the existence of uninhabitable public buildings even more incomprehensible.
The three buildings of Ajuda, Lumiar and Beato belonged, in 2021, to the Social Security Financial Management Institute.
Grande Reportagem collected this information in a public contract that the IGFSS signed, that year, with the real estate agent BDORPrime, in which the company’s services were requested to evaluate two property portfolios in the Algarve and in Lisbon, where the three buildings were located.
This year, the IGFSS opened a public tender to hire companies in the real estate sector to carry out assessments of its assets. The base value of the contest is R$272 thousand. When contacted by Grande Reportagem, neither IGFSS nor Estamo, the public manager of State properties, responded to the request to identify the current property and the justification for vacating the three buildings.
A parish
Ajuda is one of the smallest parishes in Lisbon, but based on the sample of unoccupied or unused public properties, the national diagnosis can be imagined. From the Military Hospital, which functioned as a rear hospital during the pandemic and which is awaiting a project from this Government for military health services, to the dozens of unoccupied municipal houses, only possible to identify through the armored doors that prevent occupations, Ajuda knows many public landlords.
The Ministry of Finance, for example, until recently held ownership of the houses in the Pátio das Secretarias, so known because it was from there that the secretariat of the kingdom began to govern after the 1755 earthquake.
Around half of the 10 units in the courtyard are unoccupied and those that still have tenants report deteriorating living conditions. Alfredo Monteiro, one of these tenants, counts nine basins to catch the rain that falls inside the house. In the flood of 2026, he luckily escaped the collapse of the kitchen ceiling. The rent is cheap, just over €50 which he started paying monthly to Estamo since it took over the management of the assets that belonged to Finance, but, as Alfredo Monteiro says, what is his fault for the rent being old and the time in which they were frozen?
On Rua do Jardim Botânico, a few meters from the Secretarias courtyard, a 19th century building that also belonged to the Ministry of Finance has all its units vacant except for one where Gracinda Jesus has lived for 58 years.
“The Ministry of Finance didn’t want to know anything and left it abandoned. I called there so many times. They never came to close the windows. It has been left to the pigeons for over 13 years”, says the State tenant who pays R$440 in rent per year, or R$37 per month. The septuagenarian tenant doesn’t complain about the value, but she complains about the abandonment she lives in. Why do they remain unoccupied and why do they rehabilitate houses where people could already live?
A village in the city
The first houses in the Leiria Prison School Neighborhood date back to 1947 and, like so many other prison neighborhoods, were used to house prison employees who were displaced. From the director, to the nurse, to the jailer. In the center of Leiria, a cluster of small white houses was born, in the old style of houses on the perimeter of prisons, where, in each fraction, a family entered.
This was the case with Fernando Sá Miranda, former head of the guards, former immigrant and refugee from Angola, where he was born.
“In the past, everything was full because we didn’t receive a housing subsidy. People started to leave here because with the subsidy they gave they could pay a mortgage on a house. Those who had a house on the land retired and started up. I have no one! I came from Angola with nothing, I stayed.”
Almost 70 years after the first constructions, 42 of the 58 houses in the neighborhood are vacant and only 16 remain occupied by elderly people, retired former prison guards or widowed spouses, as reported by the Ministry of Justice, which owns them. Gonçalo Lopes, the current mayor of Leiria, has already seen several projects for that neighborhood, carried out by politicians who worked in the Justice department.
“We systematically went from meeting to meeting. In 2022 we spoke with the Socialist Party, visits were made to the land, houses were identified, in 2023 we again insisted that a conclusion be reached, in 2024 we were told that part of the properties would be allocated to the Institute of Housing and Urban Rehabilitation”.
Arriving in 2026, the Ministry of Justice informs Grande Reportagem that “the transfer of ownership does not appear viable” because they are properties in the private domain of the State, an integral part of prison establishments and their security perimeter.
The MJ adds that it may be possible to rehabilitate the houses in agreement with the city hall and the agreement of Estamo. The public company, tasked in 2023 with managing all of the State’s real estate assets, did not respond to specific cases mentioned in the report. He limited himself to saying that he is inventorying and registering 60 thousand properties, a task that he expects to finish in 2026.
Journalist: Amelia Moura Ramos
Image editing: Ricardo Tenreiro
Graphics: Rui Aranha, Tiago Bento and Tomé Alves
Audio post-production: Octaviano Rodrigues
Colorist: Rui Branquinho
Editorial production: Diana Matias
Coordination: Miriam Alves
Directed by: Marta Brito dos Reis and Bernardo Ferrão
