A Spanish fund has bought the old Grémio da Lavoura in Coimbra. Housing is what comes next
Coimbra's agricultural cooperative sold the building beside the disused Estação Nova for €5.8 million after seven years on the market. It carries more than six thousand square metres of buildable area and the deed was signed on Thursday.
It waited seven years for a buyer and changed hands on Thursday. Coimbra’s agricultural cooperative has sold the former Grémio da Lavoura building, beside the disused Estação Nova in the city’s Baixa, to a Spanish property fund for €5.8 million.
The price landed close to what the sellers wanted. Cooperative president Pedro Pimenta says the offers that arrived over the years were low and the internal target sat around six million. What the buyer gets is more than six thousand square metres of buildable area a short walk from the river.
What is planned for it
The buyer is going for housing: refurbishing the five-storey building and putting up new construction at the entrance to the old headquarters, the stretch lined by the cooperative’s small warehouses. None of it has been through planning yet, and in Coimbra that gap is usually measured in years.
Pimenta puts the turnaround down to two concrete things. One is the metrobus, now close to running through the area and dragging a wider regeneration behind it. The other is the suspension of the municipal master plan along the riverfront. Investors, he says, used to look at the Metro Mondego works with disbelief and at the council with reservations about red tape; the prospect of an opening date changed the conversation. Progress on the works and the riverside regeneration is tracked by Coimbra city council.
For the seller, the money does a different job. The cooperative had bank debt this sale can pay down, and wants to invest in its grain drying and storage plant and its shops. It is also now hunting for retail space in the city, since the sales warehouse that operated inside the Grémio still mattered to the business.
A reclassified riverfront, a new transport line and foreign capital moving into empty buildings is a pattern by now: Portuguese property has climbed to 46% of all foreign direct investment, a share it has never reached before.
Photo: Olybrius / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
