Thousands of shuttered homes owned by returning emigrants from the United States and Canada weigh on Pico's market

An island historically shaped by emigration

Pico is among the islands with the strongest tradition of emigration to the United States and Canada.

Houses that open only in summer

The descendants of those emigrants return to the island only during the summer holidays.

An obstacle for those seeking a home all year round

A significant share of the island's built housing stock remains off the market.

Attempts to bring that closed housing stock back into use

The complexity of inheritances split across countries makes it hard for these properties to reach the market.

New Bedford and California, historic destinations for Pico's emigrants

Emigration from Pico to the United States, and in particular to communities such as New Bedford, in Massachusetts, and several towns in California, dates back to the middle of the twentieth century and left behind entire generations born away from the island. Many of those descendants retain a strong emotional attachment to the family home, even though they rarely visit it outside the summer holidays.

Inheritances spread across several countries, a legal stumbling block

The difficulty of bringing these homes back into use is not merely sentimental. When the original owner dies, the estate is usually divided among heirs living in different countries, which means paperwork has to be processed in several jurisdictions before the property can be sold or let. Notaries on the island acknowledge that some cases take years to settle, with the house left shuttered in the meantime.

A pattern repeated in Faial and Terceira

Homes left closed because of emigration are not unique to Pico: Faial and Terceira, with similar histories of migration to North America, have a proportionally comparable stock of shuttered housing. The difference lies in the relative weight on the overall market, which is greater in Pico given its smaller permanent resident population.

Council proposals to revive the closed housing stock

Some of the island's local councils are looking at ways of mediating with emigrant associations in the United States and Canada to make it easier to let these homes on a temporary basis during the months when they stand empty, an approach already trialled with mixed results on other islands in the archipelago facing similar problems of closed housing.