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My house has no address

Portugal

Moved to Alentejo, house has no address, makes everything very difficult. Portugal does not have definitive land demarcation and ownership in a lot of places. The house I live in is part of a huge land that the government considers one plot. Only address I can use is a post box I got from the local post office, but a lot of services don’t accept post box addresses, including the government itself!

P.S. If you are thinking of buying land, or a house… good luck figuring out where your boundaries are and what your allowed land use is

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  • Gray Crater

    •

    May 27, 2025

    A lot of land in Portugal is not quite “official“. We were a very poor country 60+ years ago, and so whenever a regular person would buy a land, it was basically a verbal agreement. For that reason there were no land demarcations or anything like that. People just knew where their land started and ended.
    At some point, the government opened a window of time where people could register their land for free, including demarcations, etc. And so many did, but many did not, and after the window of time closed, they had to pay, so they simply didn’t, however, the property is still theirs, so they could still live in it, sell it, etc.

    And that’s why you’re going through all of that mess.