You paid. They vanished. Here's what Portuguese law says about that.
You paid the deposit — or a milestone — and your builder stopped showing up, stopped picking up the phone, stopped existing. This is not the end of the case. There are clocks running and there is a path. We organize your evidence and produce a notice letter to send by registered mail (carta registada com aviso de receção) — which, in most cases, is what reopens the conversation.
Free · No card · Not legal advice.
Recognise yourself in any of these?
- You paid the deposit. Agreed a start date. They never showed up.
- You paid the first stage. They worked one week. Then they never came back.
- You paid one last time "for materials". They vanished with the money.
- You went out for the day. You came back to an empty site. Tools, materials, crew — gone.
- They don't pick up the phone anymore. WhatsApp messages stay on a single grey tick. You see them driving past in a new car, on someone else's job, living their life.
If you recognise this, you are not alone. The Portuguese national homeowners' association (ANP) reported in 2024 that "complaints are daily" — deposits paid, work never started.
But your case is not a statistic. It has dates, amounts, messages, and — therefore — legal deadlines that are running.
What happens if you do nothing
Portuguese law gives the homeowner three time windows under Civil Code art. 1225 (for buildings). In each one, silence is fatal.
- 5 years for the defect to manifest. For abandoned jobs, this clock starts when the work was supposed to have been delivered — or, failing that, the last day there was activity on site.
- 1 year from when you noticed the problem to formally denounce it. Without a registered letter, this deadline "expires in silence".
- 1 year from the formal notice to file in court. Send the letter today and you buy yourself another year to decide your next step. Don't send it, and you lose the right altogether.
The diagnostic computes all three for your situation and shows exactly how many days remain.
What we'd build with you
In ~30 minutes:
- A formal letter demanding performance or return of the deposit (CC art. 442 entitles you to twice the deposit on breach by the contractor; the alternative request is termination + damages).
- A case file with the precise chronology: date of the quote, day you paid, last day they showed up, date they stopped replying. Each fact paired with its evidence.
- A criminal-route recommendation in parallel when there are fraud markers — pay-and-ghost, fake identity, repeat victims. Civil and criminal run alongside each other, not as alternatives.
- An AT (tax authority) complaint if no invoice was issued — free, online, immediate pressure.
What this isn't
- It's not a promise to recover money. If your contractor has no assets, no letter — ours, DECO's, or a lawyer's — recovers money that doesn't exist. But the criminal complaint, in parallel, works differently; and most cases settle before court when a formal letter arrives.
- It's not court representation. We aren't lawyers. If the civil path goes to court, you need one — and our case file saves them billable hours.
- It's not legal advice. Templates carry the elements Portuguese law and case law require for a valid interpelação, but you author the letter on your own behalf and decide whether to send. Lawyer review is your call.