Portimão’s mayor finally has lost patience with the family that owns the crumbling Convento de São Francisco.
Deeply annoyed with delays in resolving the issues surrounding the ruin, mayor Isilda Gomes has finally accused the current owners, believed still to be the Souza Coutinho family, of playing about with the council and now vows to seek a legal remedy to save the building.
"Enough of playing around with Portimão" said the mayor during the last session of the Municipal Assembly, saying she would now take action from a position of strength brought about by the owners’ inaction.
Isilda Gomes said that the owners have to make decide what they are going to do with C16th convent whose state of disrepair has been an embarrassment to Portimão council for decades.
The mayor now threatens to use all possible legal actions, although she does not say how she will resolve the stalemate but adds that she is to meet the owners shortly.
The owners and the council so far have managed to delay any decision in a muddle of deliberate bureaucratic confustication so now Gomes is to get ‘personally involved.’
In 2008, the wild-spending former mayor Manuel da Luz claimed the building would be subject to a compulsory purchase order and turned into a Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Tourism.
The Manuel da Luz regime collapsed in a pile of debt and arrests and the Convent was forgotten until 2013 when a group of citizens started a movement to push for an urgent intervention to save the Convent from further collapse and degradation.
The council of course expressed its support but at the same time announced that the legislation did not allow it to intervene. The council also revealed that when trying to purchase the convent, at a time when the council was struggling with debts of €130 million left my Manuel da Luz, the owners had demanded a price that the council described as ‘exorbitant.’
Founded in 1530, the Convento de S. Francisco was built around an existing church, the Igreja e Convento de Nossa Senhora da Esperança. The convent was damaged severely in the earthquake of 1755 with the original church roof and other buildings falling in.
Later, the convent was purchased and used for warehousing. A fire in 1884 destroying what was left of the inside of the structure.
The ruin was purchased In 1911 by João António Júdice Fialho who used the space in his canning business. The convent was classified as Property of Public Interest in 1993 but lies in ruins, privately owned and in need of sensitive development or opened to the public as a sad example of how Portugal looks after its patrimony.
