How modular homes are rebuilding Portugal’s ruins
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, we’re looking at a wooden house revolution that's happening in Europe. Concrete’s carbon footprint is turning architects and construction companies towards trees.
In Portugal, a rush of new residents to the sparsely populated rural areas – and a lack of builders – is driving the flat-pack and modular wooden house market. Many of these rural plots often have a ruined, abandoned house on them, creating opportunities for faster construction.
We also meet an architect who has dedicated his life to building in wood, championing a material he believes is key to more sustainable design.
If you’d like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presented and produced by Alastair Leithead
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, CEO of Canva Melanie Perkins, and the CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol.
(Photo: Wooden modular house. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service with me, Alastair Leithead. |
| 0:14.8 | Today, I'm meeting one of my neighbours in this remote, rural part of Portugal I call home, |
| 0:20.5 | to learn why so many people here are building wooden houses. |
| 0:24.7 | So the Industrial Revolution changed the status of wood |
| 0:27.8 | from the world's best building material to fuel to make steel. |
| 0:32.6 | We've woken up and realized that we have this miraculous material that can hoard carbon instead of |
| 0:40.0 | produce it. |
| 0:40.9 | It's a lesson Sweden's been learning for many years. |
| 0:43.5 | 36% of all the total global carbon dioxide emissions is from construction sites globally. |
| 0:52.7 | Modular houses ready built-built-in factories, |
| 0:55.3 | are cheaper and quicker solutions to a housing crisis. |
| 0:58.5 | With the labour shortage, it's easier to have people |
| 1:01.5 | that are working here and living nearby. |
| 1:05.0 | And under regulatory pressure, |
| 1:06.9 | even big construction companies |
| 1:08.6 | are now starting to see the wood for the trees. |
| 1:11.2 | That's all coming up on today's business daily. |
| 1:20.5 | Well, it's a beautiful sunny day here in Sao Teutonio, |
| 1:24.2 | my local town in the southwestern corner of Alentejo in Portugal, |
| 1:29.1 | close to the coast, near to the Algarve. One of the most unlikely places you'd perhaps find one of the world's most well-known |
| 1:35.2 | professors of wood architecture, Alex Dadaika. He's bought a little plot, and it's so new he hasn't |
... |
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