OK this is lifted from Fark, but I know the car heads on here will love this.
The story: man in Portugal buys a farm. When he gets round to levering open the door of the old barn he finds…
Link has lots and lots of photographs in it.
Wow, that’s nuts. That must have been really friggin sweet to have been the discoverer.
Holy cripes! I’ll bet the sales agent is :smack: to the twentieth power now. Moral of the story: don’t be too lazy to check out an entire property before you sell it!
Wow, I’m not a car head, but I’m pretty impressed. Wait 'til Tuckerfan sees this. Any ideas what it’ll all be worth?
Mon Dieu! I was expecting one, maybe TWO old cars! Mercy!
Wow, when you start looking at the car names and do a search for them, you get some incredible collectors stuff.
http://www.lifeontop.com/?p=176
There are so many that it takes ages to find them all.
I think we should each try to find a link to at least one picture of each car in good condition.
Make a good game.
This should help you out.
Well, it will give the buyer something to do with his retirement. I’m not a die-hard car freak, but some of those beauties had me drooling. If the buyer doesn’t clear at least a million off these cars, he got robbed!
Say, that reminds me of all the cars we stashed in the moonshiner’s tunnel when prohibition ended. Had no use for hot rods any more, so I just left them there to collect dust. Might be worth dusting them off now. If I can only recall where I left the bills of sale…
The value of some of those cars should easily pay for the cost of the farm. One of the car’s identified as an MG looks more like a very rare BMW to me, but who knows? I wonder how many of them still run?
How could they guy’s neighbors not know he was hording cars in there? Or his relatives?
Man that guy is one lucky S.O.B. He hit the jackpot!
Portugal, eh? Nice, dry climate… these babies should still be in pretty good condition. Wipe the birdshit off 'em and you’ve got a pretty damn sweet collection there.
Not one proper car in there :dubious:
Just kidding!! Opening that barn must have been like entering Alladins cave.
Like finding a pile of Hemi’s, Yenkos, Shelbys, LT1’s and SS’s here in the states.
Couple of thoughts.
Looks like the guy was storing cars for other people. Maybe they’ve all been reported stolen over the years as he may have hid them on the owners?
Good luck finding the titles.
Every car in that barn has years of bird/bat shit on it. Paint shot.
But aside from those couple things I’d love to be the guy with the barn full of cars anyday. It would be fun and probably profitable to start sorting through those cars to see what you’ve really got. It might cost a fortune to buff/paint the exteriors and recondition the engines, transmissions, interiors, etc., but fun nontheless.
I keep thinking of what it must have been like to open those doors for the first time:
“My God! It’s full of cars!”
gasp
MG Magnette. I read an article on them last year. IIRC they pop up for sale from time to time; but good examples are hard to find, as they were very prone to rust.
What are the cars worth? No idea. But I know, based on some poking around I did a few years ago, that a restored Austin Mini can go for $10,000 to $18,000 in California. Even a ‘daily driver’ will fetch $8,000. A restored Alfa Romeo Giulietta convertible seems to get $35,000 or so nowadays. A coupé? I don’t know. Porsche 356 coupés in nice condition seem to be selling for over $30,000. The others? I’ve at least heard of most of them, but mostly from reading 1960s car magazines.
Of course the best prices come from total restorations. I was chatting with a couple of guys yesterday. One said (paraphrasing) ‘If an Austin-Healey 3000 sells for $85,000 at auction, then people think their “daily driver” 3000 is worth $50,000. And it will cost a lot to bring it up to high-dollar standards.’ I don’t remember exact phrasing of an example he gave, but it was along the lines this: Someone buys a very nice example of the AH3000 for $85,000. He has to put $25,000 into it to have a car that will fetch $85,000 at auction.
Certainly most or all of those cars are restorable. But it will take gobs of time and money to make them into cars that will fetch the big money. Still, an unrestored car that is complete can be worth a bit. And if it’s a particularly rare model, people will pay a lot for just a body shell.
Oh, that would suck! I wonder if there’s a statute of limitations on the recovery of stolen property in Portugal? I see a lot of cars (mostly ‘parts cars’) for sale with no title in the U.S. I’m guessing that one can obtain a title – if the car isn’t stolen.
Looking at the collection it seems to me that it’s rather eclectic for a collector. And I would think that there would be some that were obviously in various stages of restoration. It does look on the surface as if the guy who collected them might have been restoring them for other people. On the other hand, he may have simply found these cars and bought them legitimately with the intention of restoring them for his own collection. A lot of people collect ‘projects’ and never get around to working on them. Classic Motorsports has a column called Ran When Parked. Most of the photos show individual cars in various states of decay. But occasionally there will be a photo of a yard that has several classic cars mouldering away.
The cars in the link may be stolen, or they may be legitimate. I think we all dream of finding buried treasure or the ‘Car In The Barn’. I hope for the sake of the guy who bought the farm that the cars are not stolen.
I have nothing at all to add, except that someone pulled that shit on my dad a few years back. He put his car in storage about 15 years ago. Paid rent every year, and then lapsed for a few years. After he hadn’t paid up in about 5 years he took a drive by and peeked though the doors. Yup, still there. So he calls up, offers all the back rent plus an extra $500 for not moaning about the rent, and not having the car hauled out (at this point the farm was owned by someone else. They say “It’s not there, we cleared everything out when we bought the place” “Oh, okay, well I’m going to calle the police then”
“Why”
“Well I have the title to the car in my hand, but the car is gone, I have to report it stolen, if someone else is driving around in MY car, I don’t want to be responsible for it”
“You can’t call the police”
“Well, I don’t have the car, and you don’t have the car, so it’s stolen”
“You can’t call the police”
“Look, I stopped up a few days ago with my BIL Officer xxx of the xxx Police department and we saw the car in the barn, so my offer still stands, I’ll give you the back rent plus 500.”
“Okay, come get it”
“Thank you”
(They where a bunch of slack jawed yokel redneck idiots)
As I wrote that out, I wonder how many of those cars will go back to rightful owners. Assuming the old farm owner was renting out storage space, I’d guess that anyone that has titles to the cars would get first dibs if they want it. OTOH, if the old farm owner was a car nut and they belonged to him, and the titles are on the property somewhere and all the legal stuff works out, he sure as hell got off lucky, even if he doesn’t want anything to do with them, all he’s got to do is have an auction.
I must say, those photos have given my husband and I plenty to talk and dream about! I’ve been having the most fun speculating about HOW this could have happened. Didn’t the neighbors know? Was it that isolated? Was the farm taken by the county for back taxes and sold at the courthouse steps (as it were; I don’t know if that figure of speech applies in Portugal!). Weren’t there any heirs? Didn’t any relatives exist that knew about it?
My husband started getting sick yesterday and laid down to take a nap. In a wake/dream state he started getting the idea that WE had found a barn full of old cars. It was so vivid he had a hard time shaking it! He’s of half a mind to go out buying old property … maybe one will have a barn full of old cars…
Don’t worry; it’s surely a temporary delirum! 
Jay Leno - EAT YOUR HEART OUT
I’ve got money that when he see’s the inventory sheet, he’s on a plane or at least on the horn to purchase one or several of those autos.
Swoons What a find.
I’ve actually been to a place somewhat like this before, a remote, private ranch a few miles from ours in Colorado that has three warehouses filled to the brim with classic autos although, remarkably, all these are restored to pristine condition. The owner is one of the most unique, self reliant, interesting guys I’ve ever met. He’s about 75 and has a passion for Model As, having used them extensively as a boy on his ranch. But his collection goes far, far beyond. We just toured just one warehouse on a ball freezin’ December morning but oogled over a gorgeous 1904 Cadillac, a RR Silver Shadow, Dusenberg, BMW, old Mercedes, Buicks, a couple of unbelivable BelAirs and others, equally impressive, who’s make I’ve since forgotton. He’d restored them all by himself and his explanations of the work involved just left me floored. He showed us the last one he was going to do, another Model A, and it was little more than a rustbucket. That he could create cars that looked showroom new from such was simply staggering. There were two other warehouses we didn’t even go into, all equally full, probably around 75 or 80 classic cars, all restored, alltogether.
It was the most bizarre sensation walking through his collection, a time zone spanning decades, viewing classic cars brought back to perfection but that all were covered by a light coat of dust and were way out in the plains on some remote, non-descript place where no one else knew about them. Surreal, indeed.
He has just one heir, a son who, apparently, isn’t the least bit interested in them.