Para abrir o apetite ao AlexJ e do Palhais (e outros, eventualmente) aqui vai um capítulo inteiro (excepto as fotos) do livro
da autoria de Keith Martin and Linda Clark.
THIS TALE REMINDS ME of those unsolicited letters you sometimes receive in the mail—the ones that invite you to a complimentary dinner in exchange for two hours of your time, during which you’ll be captive to a sales pitch from a couple of guys trying to sell you land or mutual funds. In this case, the pitch may be secluded property in Portugal. Or a fund that invests in vineyards, cork, or Portugal’s fertile agricultural land.
It is the kind of story that is picturesque and sweet, but too good to be true. But it is true, and it begins with a bunch of photographs of old cars.
The story and the photos appeared on the Internet. And the incredible pictures of vintage cars encrusted with decades of grime in a musty-looking cinderblock building were irresistible to car collectors.
You may have received the email yourself: there were several slightly different versions, but they all went something like this:
A New York man retired and wanted to use his retirement money wisely so it would last, so he decided to buy a home and a few acres in Portugal. The modest farmhouse had been vacant for 15 years. The owner and his wife both had died and there were no heirs. The house was sold to pay taxes.
There had been several lookers, but the large barn and steel doors had been welded shut. Nobody wanted to go to he extra expense to see what was in the barn, and it wasn’t complimentary to the property anyway, so nobody made an offer on the place.
The New York guy bought it at just over half the property’s worth, moved in, and set about to tear into the barn. Curiosity was killing him. So he and his wife bought a generator and a couple of grinders and cut through the welds. What was in the barn?
Now that your curiosity was piqued (as mine was), the email directed you to a link that provided photographic images of the barn’s contents. Only a handful of the cars were highly valuable, but the sheer number of them and their dusty patina was captivating. They seemed to number in the hundreds, and although most were European, there were some American cars too. Looking at them, you couldn’t help but feel that you had discovered something incredible.
But at the same time, a part of you knew that a car collection this big wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. It couldn’t have—someone, somewhere, would have heard about it, written about it, talked about it, or photographed it long ago. Why would it appear only now? After so many years and so many cars? It didn’t make sense—this huge building full of slumbering, undisturbed cars didn’t make sense.
Soon the Internet was hopping with all these questions and more. Some people even ventured answers, but most were too bizarre to be believable. And not long afterwards, a couple of websites concluded that the email was bogus, a hoax, a fraud, a trick. Of course, many car collectors had already figured that out for themselves.
Yet the photos had been made public for a reason, and no one was quicker to investigate their source than Tom Cotter in Sports Car Market magazine. About the time I was reading the suspicious story for the first time, Cotter was writing in his May 2007 column that the Portuguese barn find story was pure fiction. Being a lifelong car-in-the-barn finder, Cotter, (author of Motorbooks’ In the Barn series) immediately did some digging, and he was able to ferret out some of the real story.
DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH
A photographer named Manuel Menezes Morais, according to Cotter, had shot the car collection for its owner, a former car dealer who saved some of the cars he encountered in the course of business. At that time, the name of the owner and the collection’s exact location were still undisclosed, but it was believed to be somewhere near Lisbon. Over the Internet, some collectors theorized the photos had been taken to catalog the collection for promotion or insurance purposes.
In the spring of 2009, German journalist and photographer Wolfgang Blaube traveled to Portugal, met with the owner and his son, and photographed many of the cars. His discovery was detailed in a two-part story in the French car enthusiast weekly La Vie de L‘Auto on July 29 and August 5, 2009. Blaube actually found not one, but two large buildings, one containing around 189 cars and the other 103 cars.
The story revealed that the owner of the buildings and the cars, Antonio Ferreira de Almeida, had begun amassing the collection after Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution. It was not uncommon at that time for Portuguese collectors to store their cars in nearby Spain or sell them for a song. By the mid-1980s—and not yet 40 years old—Antonio had acquired over three hundred cars. He never missed a chance to buy one at a bargain price, and he ended up with cars of nearly every make, year, and country of origin. When his buying spree cooled in the mid-1990s, he had amassed about four hundred cars for his collection. It’s estimated that about a hundred of them were in good-to-excellent condition.
Not surprisingly, because the photos had been circulated all over the Internet, the cars are for sale, but only the cars in the two huge buildings; according to Blaube another hundred or so cars are parked in underground garages in and around Lisbon. They contain Antonio’s favorites, such as a Porsche 356 Carrera, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT, Deutsch-Bonnet LeMans, and two early Citroen DS Chapron convertibles that are not for sale.
Antonio and his son, Antonio Jr., are savvy collectors who haven’t priced the cars cheaply, said Blaube. The scope of the collection is immense. The makes range from Abarth, Alfa-Romeo, Auburn, and Austin Healey to Volvo, Volkswagen, Wolseley, and Wartburg. American manufacturers include Chevys, Buicks, Cadillacs, Fords, Oldsmobiles, Plymouths, Pontiacs, Lincoln Continentals, Packards, and Studebakers.
There’s also a 1932 Chrysler CD Roadster, 1968 Ford Mustang, 1967 Plymouth Barracuda, 1958 Nash Metropolitan, 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, 1946 Willys Jeep, three 1950s Facel- Vegas, and a couple of Formula Fords, to cite a few models.
Some of the European models include a 1959 Alfa-Romeo Giulietta Spider, 1955 Jaguar XK-140 roadster, 1958 Austin-Healey Sprite MK1 roadster, 1962 MGB roadster, two 1955 MG Magnettes, 1966 Maserati Quattroporte, 1971 Opel 1900 coupe, 1957 Porsche 356A coupe, and 1967 Steyr-Puch 650 TR, to name a few.
There’s even a 1973 Datsun 240Z and two 1960s Honda coupes. Although many have already sold, a comprehensive list of the cars as of the spring of 2009 can be found on the
www.hagerty.com website. It doesn’t include every car seen and photographed by Blaube, but it lists most of them. Blaube also recounts his Portugal barn find quest in greater detail in Tom Cotter’s 2010 book, The Corvette in the Barn.
Exactly who invented the tale of the New York couple retiring to Portugal’s countryside only to discover a long-forgotten building full of vintage cars remains unknown. But the accompanying photos turned out to be authentic, even if the story wasn’t. And while it may have all been just a publicity ploy, it led to a fascinating true story in the end.
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