Rudyard Blake

bren reece wrote:Hi all, I'm looking to buy a plot of land 1000sq m or so to put a tiny home on it.  I'm seeing properties say only tents campers and houses on wheels.  What does this mean? Only temporary camping allowed on your own land. I'm just starting to look and could use some pointers.

What you want to do is more complicated than it seems.

So basically in Portugal land has two kinds of designations, 'urban/residential', or 'rural/agricultural'.

If you want to do things legally and legitimately and not risk being thrown off your own land, you need to look for land that is designated 'urban', as you cannot legally live on or build a house (tiny or otherwise) on rural land. Some land may have bits that are designated urban and bits that are designated rural (for example, a land with a legal house with olive groves attached).

If a land is designated urban but has no house, this means it can be a building plot, but not a farm, etc.

If you want to build a structure on your land, even if it's just an agricultural building, you need to get planning permission if you don't have it. You need to have a qualified architect draw up a project, file it with the council, pay a bunch of money, get permission to start, etc. It takes months, it can be quite expensive, and then you only get a limited amount of time to start the work.

You are allowed to have temporary structures 'stored' on your land though, for example tents, tipis, caravans, on the condition that they have no foundations (so you can't build a concrete base for your caravan for instance). That and they need to be able to be dismantled or removed, so you can't just build a tiny house that can't be dismantled. And you are not legally allowed to reside in these temporary structures full time unless you have planning permission for them as a legally registered abode, which can be hard to get depending on your property and location.

So basically the land you are seeing is likely not land that is legal for full time habitation or usable for building a house. It's usually quite cheap for this reason. Lots of people buy these agricultural-only lands thinking they can live in a caravan, or build a cob building with no planning permission, or something, and have a permaculture project. In some places the council and your neighbours may turn a blind eye, but in a lot of places you will risk being fined and thrown off your land.

So be very careful when you're buying your land to make sure that you are legally allowed to do what you want to do with it. Go through a good estate agent that can explain to you in English. If you want to build a house with foundations (tiny or otherwise) you will need urban-designated land with planning permission. Turning 'rural' land into an 'urban' designation is not worth bothering with as it is very difficult, if not often impossible.

Also be aware that there are a lot of restrictions on the ways you can build new buildings in Portugal and if the house is legitimate it needs to be designed by an architect and will have to be quite conventional, with like standard sizes for doors, minimum sizes for rooms, and other mandatory regulations which are often quite silly (like every new build must have a bidet in the bathroom), so you can't just design it however you like.

Your best bet will be to find land with a small ruin that used to be a house for habitation. Many of these would not get permission to be built for habitation purposes now-a-days but if it is registered to legally exist, and is marked in the registo cadastral that it was/is a house for habitation, even if it's a tiny little hovel, you will find i t much easier to make it into a legal abode again. There are a lot of lands with ruins, but most of them were agricultural support buildings and you can't legally make them into a house or live in them (a lot of people buy cheap land with ruins thinking they can do this, only to be bitterly disappointed when they learn that it's not allowed). Tell your estate agent that you are only interested in ruins with an 'urban' designation that can be turned back into a house.

We've just bought 4ha that has a ruin in the middle. It's very small, but people used to live in it so it's registered as a house not an agricultural shed and we will be turning it back into a house to live in. We would never get permission to build anything new, but rebuilding a ruin is much easier permission-wise. Something like that is probably your best bet, plus doing up a ruin is easier than building a tiny house from scratch in some ways.

Hope this helps.

Austin Shackles wrote:The plans for the stove come from Walker Stoves but do note the information on the home page about ordering from outside the US, which is apparently not working.  Also I hear that Matt has recently moved house so maybe it will take a while for him to get in touch.  Note that our build is the "tiny" cookstove, there's also a larger one if you want.

Thanks for your explanation! So the basic design requires metal parts from the US unless you can fabricate them yourselves?

We've had such trouble ordering things from the US that I am very reluctant to do that again. I ordered something in January from a great company, it shipped immediately, but it took four months to get to Portugal. We had to pay over €300 extra to get it released from customs and then it was delivered to the wrong address three times, despite being correctly labelled, and almost sent back to the USA if we hadn't gone to claim it from the depot.

But there's loads of small stove building companies near us with welding workshops - I guess it would be possible to ask them to make something to custom fit the inside of the stove.

Welding is such a useful skill!!

Hi Austin,
We are in Portugal too and are interested in building something similar.

Where are you planning to get the cast iron (or is it steel) fire box and doors and whatnot to go inside? I can see that sort of thing being really hard to find here unless you have them custom made?

We look forward to seeing your finished result and best of luck with it!

Regards, Rudyard

John F Dean wrote:I have caught it eating.  It’s behavior is still off of center(withdrawn). I will be watching it closely the next few days.

Did your goat recover?

John F Dean wrote:As you have indicated, I would consider a firebreak ….at least to slow  the fire from being pushed by prevailing winds.   I suspect I might search a little more to get specifics on the pattern the fire spread in on previous occasions.  Having access to water may significantly help those fighting future fires.

There is a well on the property (don't know where it is yet as it's all overgrown and the owner doesn't remember), but wouldn't firefighting with our own water require an extremely high-powered pump in order to be effective? I used to work at sea and we did a lot of fire fighting training. We always used big diesel generator powered pumps to blast water through those special chunky hoses. Something to consider anyway.

I'm looking at purchasing a lovely 4 hectare (10 acres or 40,000m2) plot of young mixed native woodland to keep my goats on and eventually to live on. The property has a ruined house on it that was abandoned probably well over a decade ago when the area burned before. I think it has also burned once more since then as I can still see charred timbers around. It will very likely burn again at some point.

This region is prone to wildfires and with higher temperatures every year, the risk is always increasing. The property is now quite thickly wooded across most of it, with mainly young oaks, pines and a thick understory of scotch broom and bramble.

I will be putting my goats on it, but I only have six at the moment so it will take them a long time to have an impact, if any. I will be getting a few more though and hopefully pigs too.

I really like the woodland and want to keep it in as natural state as possible, but we would like to eventually move onto this property and I am concerned that the whole lot is just a tinderbox at present. I am worried about doing the house up and moving in, only for it to burn down again a few years later. And of course the safety of the animals is also a concern.

Some of the neighbours' properties are also very densely overgrown.

I especially wanted to keep the trees around the edges of the land, for privacy, however part of me thinks that the best thing might actually be to just clear a sort of 'airstrip' all around the edges to try and reduce the risk of any fires spreading from a neighbouring property?

I will also try to clear out the understory, as at the moment it's too thick to walk through in many places.

Many people in this region would just raze everything to the ground for safety since these are not fruit trees and they don't really care for nature, but I want to know if there is anything more I could do to reduce fire risk while retaining the woodland as much as possible?

Collard greens and tree kale both match your description. They were traditionally grown mainly as livestock fodder in several regions. Some varieties can grow as tall as small trees, they are perennial where I am and massively productive.

I grow them for me and my goats...  I grow Couve Galega and Jersey Walking Stick. Both are delicious and make huge tasty leaves that are somewhere between cabbage and kale.

Nancy Reading wrote:Two seasons on in the battle of the beast plants- how did the patch grow Rudyard? Were you able to keep it going last year?

Ah, well, I've moved to Portugal now so I've no idea what they're up to! Someone visited the place in the autumn though and said there were still lots of Jerusalem artichokes growing there - no idea how well they were doing or not though!

I'd first look at natural situations where trees of your chosen species have survived that long and try to replicate it.

I remember reading that in order to have a shot at living to their maximum age, trees need to grow up fairly straight and well balanced, losing no major limbs. Major limb loss presents an easy avenue for rot and infections that can kill the tree very slowly and shorten its life, plus it makes it unbalanced and more likely to blow down in a big storm.

So I think the early years (first few decades) are very important, making sure that the trees incur no damage and allowing them to grow in accordance with their natural form.

Or you could go the complete opposite direction and grow them as a coppice (depending on your species), which I've been told can live indefinitely, as well as providing useful wood for 300 years.