LAND GRABBING IN THE ALGARVE

 

Orla Dargan

An Irish woman is still traumatised and living in hiding because of aggressive intrusions and violent threats, arising from a land dispute – and is just one example of what is being described as criminal land grabbing activities.   

Orla Dargan,65, is daughter of a CEO/chairman of the international Aer Lingus airline, and chairman of CRH plc, the largest global manufacturer and distributor of construction materials. After retiring as a city investment banker in London, Ms Dargan bought a home in the Algarve in 2016 for €180,000, and planned a rebuilding programme costing €600,000. However, her happy life in the small, tranquil town of Santa Barbara de Nexe in the central Algarve was to turn into a nightmare.

On returning from a visit to Ireland in 2021, Ms Dargan found her boundary fence had been broken. Diggers had ploughed in, and waste water had been poured onto her property. A land dispute eventually went to a Faro court where a judge ruled that Ms Dargan rightfully owned her property and there should be no illegal incursions. Ms Dargan  continued to do her best to cope with the aggressive side of the dispute, but ended up fleeing and moving from place to place in Portugal and Spain, hiding in fear of her life.

“Everyone, including my lawyer, still tells me I am at risk, but the authorities in Portugal, including the police, have not been doing anything about it.” As a possible solution to protect her property, she has now invited a number of British army veterans to live there.

Ms Dargan’s is not alone in suffering this sort of intimidation in the Algarve, according to a specialist land investigator, David Mapley, he describes land grabbing, as “an economic war being conducted due to the relative impoverishment of the Portuguese versus the "wealthy" foreigners arriving and driving up local property prices.”

Mr Mapley, who mostly deals with property crimes, says that “too often unsuspecting foreigners are rendered offside in a catastrophic way, spending years, money and stress in order to restore a property status quo.”

This is hardly the happy retirement most people dream of, he says, adding: “The glacial judicial system, indifference of the police, and ineptitude and corruptibility of lawyers, all well recognised by Portuguese, result in a one-sided battle for ‘AlGrab’, where miscreants can pretty much get away with what they want.

“As a result, misrepresentation, fraud, land boundary disputes, land and home theft, or neighbourly intimidation are commonplace.”