Garrett House: Porto City Council continues negotiations

At the end of May, Rui Moreira revealed at a Municipal Assembly that negotiations were underway for the municipality to purchase the lower part of the house to install a branch of the Museum of Liberalism there.

"We have been negotiating, we have already carried out an assessment and have now ordered a second external assessment," the mayor said at the time, also revealing that "the sellers are available to [...] sell part of the building," which he said was not planned for a hotel.

Lusa asked what results were obtained through this assessment, but the municipality declined to respond.

For almost a year now, the house where Almeida Garrett was born, next to Passeio das Virtudes, has been for sale by the Porto real estate agency Metro3 for 3.8 million euros.

According to a report published by Porto Canal, the buildings were acquired in 2017 and 2018 by the public limited company Midfield — Imobiliária e Serviços, headquartered on Avenida da Boavista, and owned by members of the board of directors of Teak Capital, an investment fund owned by the Moreira da Silva family.

In November 2023, during an executive meeting, the Mayor of Porto clarified that the external assessment requested by the municipality a few years ago indicated that Almeida Garrett's house was worth around 1.5 million euros, a very different value than that requested by the owners, the reason given for not being able to exercise the right of preference.

On April 27, 2019, the house where the writer was born and lived for five years was consumed by the flames of a fire that broke out during the early hours of the morning.