How Nuno Vasconcelos, now in his fifties, came to quit his life as a banker to run the Quinta da Alcaidaria-Mór, his family’s historic Portuguese manor house near the Holy Shrine of Fátima, belongs in a Peter Mayle novel. In the 1980s, Mayle tapped into a middle-class escapist fantasy of swapping the rat race to restore a farmhouse with a vineyard in the hills of Provence.
Only in Vasconcelos’s case, the idea wasn’t a fantasy. As the second youngest of seven siblings – he has three sisters and three brothers – his decision to return to the old family home and turn it into a holiday and pilgrim retreat on the road to Fátima was the only way they could keep the house and ancient estate going. “We were never going to sell,” he says. “The important thing is to pass it on to the next generation.”
