Abandoned houses- Portugal

I'm one of a long list of Englishmen who has been to the coast of Portugal around Lisbon. When William Beckford, the eccentric and extremely wealthy hedonist, discovered Sintra in the late eighteenth-century he went about designing follies, those strange semi-architectural vestiges you can still find in the parks and gardens setting a touch of romantic decay amongst the exotic plantings of trees and ferns. There is no need to build follies these days, however: there is plenty of romantic decay in the existing buildings.
Who owns the shuttered houses? It seems that the modern Portuguese do not want to live in these elegant mansions with their ironwork grilles and high ceilings, preferring the new developments of apartment blocks and chalets. Easy to build, easy to maintain they spread out in ugly estates around the villages that are not protected, with little room for the pedestrian but ample parking space for the car; not much garden to care for, few trees and easy access to the shops.
Beckford was queer in all senses of the word. He wrote a strange novella called Vathek and hobnobbed with arty types. These arty types still exist. I was invited to a life-drawing class by a woman I met in the street and thought that the place was ideal for a community of artists. If only someone would surrender the keys to that beautiful house on the edge of the Parque da Liberdade to make an art school!
Setúbal, Lisboa, Sesimbra and Azeitao all had their share of follies. These abandoned houses are not necessarily so big that they could not be inhabited. Indeed in Sesimbra, a vibrant fishing village, the houses are famously small showing the preference of the fishermen for accommodations that resembled the cabins they were used to at sea. Now a walk through the old quarter is saddening as the tiles are falling off the facades and the whitewash is peeling. Along the seafront enormous five star hotels offer air-conditioned modernity to the tourist who wants sand and sea without roughing it.
This makes me reflect on whether my attachment to these vestiges of the past is just a Romantic dream. If you can't get digital TV and the kitchen isn't big enough for a washing machine and a dishwasher then who is going to want to do up one of these old ruins. On top of that they have those old wooden shutters that probably do nothing to keep the heat or the cold out in comparison to the omnipresent rollerblinds that make modern flats in Portugal look like closed banks at midday.
We went to the Manueline church of Bom Jesus in Setúbal. There was a whiskered chap at a desk listening to samba on his transistor radio and looking out across the concreted-over park in front, where youths sporting backward caps and blazoned T-shirts skateboarded badly on the slopes and high fived in the midday sun. The combination of samba and late gothic architecture was appealing and I stayed there whilst Carmen went off to the park with the kids. I was the only one in the building besides the bored warder and I thought of Pillip Larkin- 'randy for antique'- and his predictions about the future fate of churches in High Windows. Then I went to the museum, paid my euro to the surprised ticket man and spent fifteen minutes with the Portuguese primitives before the overwhelming urge for the bathroom made me rush out in search of a bar.
I kept thinking, 'This is important stuff. Don't people value it?' And I suppose some people do. The Museu de Arte Antica in Lisboa is a wonderful cool building, which alleviates the runny nose and itching eyes of an allergic reaction to the city in the space of ten minutes. I wandered around the deserted halls winking and smiling at the bored guards as I sought out Nuno Gonçalves' altarpiece with its dozens of potrait heads. Someone is prepared to pay a lot of money to maintain this- not many people are interested in looking at it.
It's a bit like the houses. Everyone thinks that Sintra is wonderful. They even talk about it as though they shared in it in some way: the micro-climate, the trees, the wonderful old buildings. But I enjoy the fact that it is all slowly crumbling away in neglect- leaving us with truly modern follies.