Portugal

Imagine you wake up one fine morning with a dream in your head that won’t go away. No matter how much you try it just stays there. Now your dream begins to take shape. Your idea is joined by shapes, colours, sounds. You start to feel it crystallise in your imagination, to hear it, to see it before you, to smell it in your nose and taste it on your lips. Your idea grows. It’s time to get up. The day begins and you imagine that everything was just a nice dream. Because however good the idea was, it’s just …

More and more buildings in Portugal are empty. Especially houses in city centres. This is something that Arrebita! Porto wants to change by adopting a social enterprise model. If the pilot project succeeds in Porto, where the problem is particularly bad, it could be a sustainable way out of the crisis for the whole country. The streets that lead down to the banks of the Douro are flanked by old buildings. They form part of Porto’s Ribeira old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There was a time when their colourful tiled façades sparkled in the sunshine and they were …