While they were cleaning out the attic, they were going to throw away an old record player, until the old turtle peeked out of the box.
Turtles can live to be a hundred years old or more. A lot longer. It doesn’t help that they’re quiet and slow, so when a pet turtle disappears, it’s anyone’s guess what happened to the reptile.
They’re literally lost-and-found creatures sometimes
The Almeida family from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had a pet tortoise named Manuela. Lenita Almeida had the turtle as a childhood pet. But in 1982, Manuela disappeared. The family was devastated.
The only possibility, at least in their minds, was that Manuela had slipped into the forest when construction workers left a door open.
Now, fast forward thirty years later.
When Lionel Almeida, Lenita’s father, died in January 2013, his children went up to the second floor to clean out a storage space their father had been using, as they could always use the extra space.
Lenita’s brother Leandro found a box with an old record player. He wanted to throw it away, but his neighbor suddenly asked him if he also intended to throw away the turtle that came out of the box.
Leandro looked at Manuela the lost turtle, alive after thirty long years!
“At that moment I turned white, I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Manuela was reunited with Lenita, who really missed the tortoise and had given up all hope of finding the animal.
She admitted that looking for the turtle in the second-floor storage room had never crossed her mind.
Anything my dad thought he could fix, he picked up and brought home. If he found an old TV, he thought he could use part of it to fix another one in the future, so he kept accumulating things.
Lenita continued,
We never dared enter this room. We’re all delighted that Manuela’s back. But no one can understand how she managed to survive for 30 years in there, it’s just unbelievable.
