Moving to Portugal — An immigrant experience of Lisbon, Part I (by Lisa Morrow & Kim Hewett)
Even before the pandemic, many people, particularly US citizens, have been looking to move somewhere that offered a better quality of life. One of the main criteria is it must be safe, and on the surface Portugal appears to be a good option. Nobody gets killed at school by rampaging gunmen, the country isn’t always at war, or threatening war, and most people aren’t openly aggressive towards people of colour. So, what’s to worry about?
The question of how we learn about the practicalities of immigrating to a new country critically depends on the scope of your enquiries. How deep do you go and how do you rate the sources you use to draw conclusions? My husband and I, both sociologists and writers, lived in Lisbon for three and a half years. We had travelled there several times before and already had a few Portuguese friends before we decided to move. We didn’t speak much Portuguese but it wasn’t our first time starting life in a new country where we didn’t speak the language. We did everything ourselves, there was no relocation agent, and we knew obtaining accommodation, dealing with bureaucracy and getting settled would require patience and a lot of energy. Even having a relocation agent doesn’t count for much, because once you’re settled, the problems don’t end there.
We started off by collecting information from official government sources such as consulates and the Portuguese immigration department (SEF). We applied for and received our Schengen visas which allowed us to enter Portugal where we could apply for one year resident permits. As far as we were concerned we’d been given verifiable facts based on written law so everything should have been straight forward. On arrival in Portugal, however, we learned this wasn’t the case. Nothing was clear, there was no consistency and officials were loath to commit to their answers. Like many, we looked for solutions from other foreigners in a number of different Facebook groups focussed on life in Lisbon and Portugal. Members included people from Europe, South Asia, the US, Middle East and the UK, young workers, the self-employed, retirees, job seekers — basically a diverse range of ages, experiences and expectations. One thing common to all these groups was the picture of Portugal as a warm, welcoming and relaxed place to live.
What we found instead, were a people mean with their time and generosity, a bureaucratic system happy to take our money, only to shrug when their lack of professionalism caused us problems they refused to take responsibility for, and a rental system geared to protecting landlords. Even more disturbing was a realisation that Portugal lacks the energy, imagination and courage to change. And worst of all, its level of humanity is very low.
If you’re thinking about moving to Portugal and tempted by the stories you read in expat groups on Facebook and elsewhere, here are some of our experiences of relocating to and living in Lisbon.
Residency permits
Working out how to apply for a residence permit and what paperwork to supply is tricky. SEF provides a list of minimum requirements and the documents needed, but the latter are part of a much longer list. This means they can always ask for extra documents as and when they choose, and why they might do so is a bit of a grey area. If you can’t supply everything they require your application can be delayed or possibly even denied. One interviewer might request ten documents. Another might want fifteen. So you take EVERY bit of paper and hope you’re not asked for one you don’t have. While you’re in Portugal on your initial visa you have limited entries and exits to/from the county so once they’re used up, you can’t leave Portugal until you have your permit. Too bad if you had a holiday planned in advance, or you wanted to visit family, or there’s a family emergency. Like everything else in the country, patience, attention to detail and more persistence than you ever imagined is necessary. The system is rigid, antiquated, hostile to foreigners, corruptible and slow, so by the time we received our initial residence permit cards it was already time to make appointments again to renew them.
On the day we had our appointments to renew these one year permits, we were on the metro headed to the nominated SEF office when we received a text message from a Portuguese friend telling us SEF had started a three day strike that same morning. SEF had been striking intermittently for years in protest at low pay and conditions and no notification had been sent to us about this latest action. Strikes often consist of working work to rule which means the already very slow Portuguese version of service-not-service is even slower. Regardless, we continued to our appointment because we knew if the office was really closed (as opposed to on a go slow) we’d have to ring to make fresh appointments. People wrote on FB groups about being unable to apply for or renew their resident permits when smaller SEF offices were closed due to SEF strike actions. Left with no permits or expired residence permits and no legal right to stay in the country, they were fined when they left the country, even though it was through no fault of their own. And SEF did nothing to help them.
At our assigned office, the doors were closed and a crowd had formed outside. It was 9am and we’d already spent one and a half hours getting there. There were people waiting for appointments and police officers blocking protestors, all from India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Several years earlier they’d been told if they opened up legitimate businesses they would receive residence cards. They were still waiting. The police tried to disperse the people, ordering us to go to another office to make new appointments, but we knew from strikes the previous year if we did that, we’d have to wait another 6–10 months. We’d already made these current appointments 7 months in advance and we weren’t prepared to wait longer.
We joined the queue, asked lots of questions, eavesdropped and discovered a skeleton staff were working inside. At 10am (the time of our appointments) a female clerk came out of the office and called for people with 8am appointments. Over the next hour people trickled in and we got to know the people waiting with us. There was a couple with a baby, a Chinese couple with their lawyer (if you pay a lawyer you get an appointment much sooner than if you apply on your own, which is hardly democratic) and two Taiwanese men who spoke little English. We managed to glean that one of them had a 9.30 appointment. When this was signalled by the clerk flashing her fingers up in the air so quickly we weren’t sure what time she was indicating, I accompanied the 9.30 man to the front of the queue and tried to ask where they were with appointment times. The woman just looked at me and said “Nao Golden Visa” without listening to my question. I emphatically said, “No. Not Golden Visa” back to her but she just repeated what she’d already said. This went on for a while until I finally yelled, “Nao, nao Golden Visa” and she stopped. She asked what visa I had, and after I stammered the word geral (general) she stood aside. I added in enough Portuguese that I had a husband and yelled to him to push his way through and we made it through the front door. Five hours later we walked out of the office with the receipts for our permits in hand, meaning our visa renewals were approved. All up SEF only saw about 20 people that day, so we were lucky.
We’d been told by SEF to expect a maximum wait of 30 days for processing, which suited our plans because we were booked on a flight to Turkey 7 days after that. We didn’t want to risk our permits getting lost in the mail system (see postal services entry) and not be able to fly out of Portugal, so just to make sure, we opted to take the long trip to the Immigration office again to pick them up in person. We rang the office on the nominated date and were told our visas weren’t ready and to come and pick them up two days later. We did but they still weren’t ready, so we had to return the next day. Despite arriving when the doors opened at 9 am, we were still waiting in a queue at 11 am, when we were told the card-issuing section had closed for the day. They shrugged their shoulders, hoping we would go away, but we didn’t. Instead we took a seat in front of the counter where they handed out the cards. We were prepared to sit there until somebody did something to rectify the problem they had caused us. While we sat there, people came, pleaded for their cards and then left the counter empty-handed. Then a woman came and handed over her paperwork and was told to wait. My husband sensed something odd going on and quietly edged towards the counter, where he saw the client being handed a residence card. Speechless at first, but then highly indignant, we complained loudly until someone was forced to come to the counter and assist us. We asked for our cards again, but the woman simply repeated the section was closed and turned to leave. My husband then asked, in a very loud voice if that was true, why was a woman just given her card, all the while pointing at the issuing clerk. Suddenly the staff looked worried and quickly formed a huddle, from which a senior woman soon emerged to direct us to a different counter. She signalled to the clerk there, who sullenly took our paperwork and looked it over before motioning for us to sign off. Then, with a surly look, he issued our cards.
That was in 2018. In July 2019 there were no SEF appointments available anywhere in Portugal. Despite this, Portuguese consulates in the US, Australia and elsewhere were still issuing 4 month Schengen visas to allow non-EU citizens to come to Portugal, make appointments with SEF and apply for residency. People arriving in Portugal risked being unable to get an appointment for a residence permit before their 4 month visa elapsed. When that happens, your right to stay in Portugal as a non-EU citizen reverts to a 90 day tourist visa. This visa only entitles you to stay and apply for a residence permit on the basis you are there to work for a company or as a freelancer. Self-funded retirees with the financial means to survive for twelve months were not eligible to apply for a residence permit after the 4 month permit expired. They could opt to leave for a non-Schengen country and then return to Portugal on a 90 day Schengen visa OR they had to return to their origin country to apply for and pay for another 4 month permit to stay. Given the information about the lack of appointments was widely reported in the Portuguese media, there was no valid reason Portuguese consulate services failed to make people aware of this fact. It was eventually reported that people were getting early appointments by paying bribes, so SEF stopped all appointments for renewals in response*.
Renting
Looking for a house/apartment to rent in Lisbon requires a great deal of patience, energy and persistence. It’s not like the US system where you go through the one realtor to find a property. Generally you have to do the search yourself online and then contact individual real estate agents for more information. When you email for information about the property in question, they don’t reply. Phoning isn’t much better. When I rang and identified as English-speaking, receptionists repeatedly hung up on me immediately. Then I learned to ask in Portuguese if they spoke English and they responded, once again, by hanging up. On the few occasions I did get through to ask about a particular property, it was invariably long gone as it is normal to leave ads up online as a tempter.
After staying in an AirBnB for four months in the summer of 2017, we finally managed to secure a long term rental through a local franchise of an international real estate agency targeting English-speaking clients. Accommodation in Lisbon was expensive and scarce at the time, so we opted for a quieter sea-side location on the Cascais train line. Although assured that it was standard, the rental contract was anything but. It was actually written by the landlady, a woman from an upper class old-money Lisbon family who spoke perfect English, and made us responsible for any repairs. However, we weren’t allowed to make any repairs ourselves or bring in tradesmen without her permission. We questioned the agent about this and other clauses in the lease but she claimed it was normal for Portugal. We asked our two Portuguese friends to have a look at it and they didn’t see any problems with it either. With no alternative in sight we went ahead and paid a bond of around 4,000 euros and two month’s rent in advance, terms the landlady set because we didn’t have a financial guarantor, even though we had six month’s rent in a bank account. Once we moved in we discovered the apartment was hiding faults you couldn’t see in the inspection. Kitchen cupboard doors and chair legs fell off, balcony doors were very hard to open and close, the hot water system trickled lukewarm water from the shower nozzle, room heaters didn’t work properly, and wooden boards had been put under the mattress of our bed because the springs had broken.
In winter we learned firsthand the old-fashioned metal framed double-glazed windows were useless against the biting cold, and when it rained, water flooded in through one window frame onto the floor. With useless heaters, we often climbed into bed fully clothed until we warmed up, which was very unpleasant. We learned from reading FB posts that many apartments in Lisbon don’t have double-glazed windows at all, and everyone complained about the lack of central heating. In the various places we lived, in central Lisbon, on the Cascais line and in Almada, it was common in winter to see older people sitting in parks getting as much sun as possible before returning to their ice cold houses. The cost of electricity in Portugal is the second highest in Europe, so people still burn wood or coal in the night. Consequently air pollution levels are high in Lisbon in the winter when it’s cold and damp. Even the walls sweat visible moisture, and one winter’s day I opened a book I had been reading and the pages were wet. If you have health issues, the mould of Lisbon will impact on you.
The landlady would not accept there were problems with her former home and we had to fight for everything. She insisted we make all requests or reports of damage in writing, in letters that had to be sent registered mail, from a post office two kilometres away. We had little say in when it was suitable for her to come round because the contract allowed her to set the terms. We were forever at her mercy, waiting to hear when she would send a repair man around. In the end we had to engage a lawyer to control her, as she was threatening to withhold our bond money. As soon as we were legally able to leave the property, we gave the required four months’ notice as per the contract terms. At the final inspection with our lawyer present, the landlady checked absolutely everything, going so far as to count every piece of cutlery, run her fingers over surfaces for dust, look inside the many cupboards and tick all the cheap, decorative items off the very long inventory. Our lawyer was incredulous at her behaviour. There was nothing damaged or missing but despite this the landlady was intent on finding a way to reduce our bond. In the end she agreed everything was as it should be but still was reluctant to sign off on the inventory and only did so after our lawyer made it clear that legally she had no choice. One month after the inspection, we received our bond back. Without a lawyer, the outcome might have been different. Over the three years we lived in Lisbon we learned from many non-Portuguese residents that it’s common to be required to pay high deposits and sometimes up to six months’ rent in advance, only to be stuck with substandard living conditions and no deposit refund at the end of the lease because you’re at the mercy of money-grabbing landlords and real estate agents. Advice: get a lawyer to review your contract before you sign. It cost us 500€ in the end, but it could have been more.
Telecommunications — internet, TV and phone
We all know how crucial it is to have good quality service providers, especially if you use the internet as your sole means of income, need to pay or be paid by organisations outside the EU, need to search for important information, or keep in touch with family/friends or news from home. Portugal is frequently heralded as the technology capital of Europe but to our dismay the internet speeds were poor. The streaming quality was so bad, with many of our favourite programs freezing so we went with a combined TV/phone/internet package.
Watching TV helped us relax as we dealt with the stress of leaving one apartment and moving to another. We were forever dealing with registered letters from our unreasonable landlady in response to our request for repairs in which she’d threaten and insult us, writing emails to our lawyer about them, reading the emails from her in reply and so on. Then that all stopped because our provider cut off our services, at a time when we needed them most. I had arranged for our package be transferred to our new apartment in the first week of April, but for reasons unknown, this major telco disconnected our service two weeks early. I spent two days on my mobile phone eating up credits while talking to rude, unsympathetic and robotic employees, before finally and mysteriously the services were reinstated unannounced late one Saturday. I say mysteriously because each time I tried to speak to the department responsible for reconnecting the services, the operator would only say it was an internal department, inside the company, but not connected to them, so they couldn’t put me through. These really are the words they used and despite repeated requests, they never gave me the name of the department in question.
During this botched arrangement to have the services transferred, I was told our two year contract would continue uninterrupted from the original start date. However when the installation team arrived at our new apartment I was told we had to agree to a new two year contract or they wouldn’t install it. We had nobody to whom we could lodge a complaint, and without an internet service had no way of finding one, so we reluctantly agreed to a new two year term. We were livid about the lies, but then they double billed us for the first two months in our new apartment and I spent hours trying to get through to them on the phone again to get the money back. Over the next six months we had to get them out to remove and replace a faulty modem on three separate occasions. There was no apology for the inconvenience they caused us, no compensation for the loss of service, and when two English-speaking TV channels were removed from our contract package without notice, we were told there was nothing they (or we) could do about it. Obviously if you can’t lodge a complaint they can do what they like with impunity, as our lawyer commented. The same goes for Vodaphone who started to levy a charge of €1.50 on our mobile prepay accounts without any prior warnings. They simply deducted it from our balance every six weeks and ignored our complaints, because they could.
Public transport
Lisbon has a system of rechargeable cards for using public transport and the city is divided into different zones. Not all cards can be used across all zones or all types of transport and there are different pricing structures (per month, per day, across types of transport etc). It takes a lot of work to understand which ticket is correct for what zone, and it doesn’t help that transport information, except in tourist hubs, is mostly in Portuguese. Many transport staff are unwilling to speak English, so asking them for help is fruitless. Until a few years ago monthly cards were prohibitively expensive and only financially advantageous if you worked full time and travelled every day. If you only use transport sporadically it’s still necessary to carry differently zoned transport cards, and all the cards expire after 12 months, sometimes in the middle of your travels. This means you have to buy a new card at an office or from a ticket machine at a train or metro station or ferry wharf. If there’s money left on the old card you can only get the balance transferred at a ticket office, which is no mean feat because they’re frequently closed or the official isn’t at their window. Consequently queues are long and slow. Combine this with ticket machines often being out of order, with some only taking coins, others not giving change on large denominations (€20 is considered large) it can be difficult, if not impossible to get a new card or even buy a ticket.
Unlike many other countries, where just about every corner shop sells tickets/transport cards, this is not the case in Lisbon. Even though you may have been unsuccessful getting a ticket despite your best attempts, you are going nowhere unless you risk travelling without a ticket which is not advisable. The ticket inspectors are usually thick, muscly, thuggish-looking men in black uniforms who take no prisoners, so even if your lack of ticket is a genuine mistake on your part, they’ll fine you. In spite of the risk of fines and being on the receiving end of intimidating behaviour, people do try to evade paying fares, particularly at the metro stations. It’s necessary to scan your ticket at the entry and exit turnstiles in order to open them and sometimes a person will tail you and quickly slip through the gate with you as it opens. Unlike the inspectors, station security guards rarely bothered to stop them.
Quite often the turnstiles don’t work (for days) so you have to backpedal and join another queue at another turnstile, resulting in hordes of people trying to push through. People with mobility issues are not well catered for on the Lisbon transport system, and at Cais do Sodre, a major transport/tourist hub, it was normal to find both the up and down escalators and elevators out of order during peak hours.
The metro in peak hours is a crush, and people board as soon as the doors open, making it impossible to disembark unless you push your way through the crowd. It’s extremely uncomfortable but unavoidable if you have to travel to work at those times. Heaven help you if you are catching an early morning flight and the metro is your only option. Try getting on with luggage and figure out where to put it while people are resentful and sometimes object to the extra space you occupy. There are no luggage compartments, not even on the line going to the airport.
Lisbon trams can be very crowded, with many frequented by pickpockets and a few simply impossible to board. The most notorious is the #28 which takes a circular route around Lisbon city centre. It is a crucial mode of transport up and down the steep hills for the older generation who rely on it to get their heavy shopping bags home. Over time a ride on the number 28 has become a major tourist attraction because it offers a very cheap and fairly comfortable (if you can get a seat) way to see a lot of Lisbon. In 1996, on our first trip to Lisbon, no tourist would think about catching the tram because the districts it passed through were considered dangerous and seedy. Nowadays, the queues of people waiting to board can stretch for a 100 metres and many older residents face ridiculously long waits until they reach the head of the queue and can squeeze in somehow.
As the third apartment we lived in was on the other side of the Tagus River, in Almada, the ferry was a convenient choice for us. In the two years we used them, they were all extremely old with filthy, dirty, broken and uncomfortable plastic seats, with two bicycle storage areas but none for luggage, and vile-smelling, disgusting toilets with no seats or toilet paper. The ramps for boarding are steep and unstable, making the risk of a fall and injury highly likely. If you are old or incapacitated in any way, someone will have to help you get on and off. The terminus on the Lisbon side features a walkway sloping down to the ferry boarding point from a sliding gate, which opens on cue and sees passengers wanting to board coming face-to-face with those getting off. Even though the walkway is divided to avoid collisions, boarding passengers ignore the suggestion and bump their way rudely to the ferry.
It’s a ten minute ferry trip from Lisbon to Almada but if you need to catch a bus from Cacilhas /Almada, the minute you disembark you might have to run like mad to the bus stop. If the ferry’s late (and it often was) none of the buses would wait, not even for one minute beyond departure time. I would regularly be one of about twenty people running for a particular bus around 10 o’clock at night. We’d wildly wave our arms but the driver would ignore us and drive off with a near empty bus. Luckily for me there were half a dozen buses I could catch home, but many people were heading to destinations at the far end of the line, some up to an hour away, and their next bus wasn’t due for another hour. And if you didn’t have a ticket because you couldn’t buy one anywhere, too bad. You couldn’t pay the driver. And they didn’t care.
Buses on both sides of the river are frequently late, but rigidly stick to the rules. One day I was waiting for a particular bus to come, and when it arrived 20 minutes late it couldn’t pull into the bus stop because two other buses were occupying the space. Along with a man on crutches and an old woman, I frantically signalled to the driver that I wanted to board, but the rules state he can’t pick people up unless it the bus is in the designated bus stop area. Despite our attempts he didn’t wait for the other buses to move off so he could pull in and collect his passengers. Instead he just drove around the two buses and continued on his way, leaving us stranded.
On another occasion my husband was waiting for a bus scheduled to arrive at 09:15. At 09:30 he began to wonder where it was. He was still there at 10:00, thinking the next scheduled bus was due, but at 10:20 the owner of a café opposite the stop came onto the street and announced that the buses were on strike. They were on strike the following day, too, apparently, but you’d have to know to check out the bus company web site to be aware of this. No notices were placed at bus stops.
These are just a few of the very many times buses were late, didn’t arrive, or didn’t stop. Add to that user-unfriendly websites and a complex system of different bus stops for different routes spaced out along the street and you get an idea of why there is plenty of room for improvement.
Read Learn more in Part II about racial/social relations, supermarkets, making friends, postal services, customs, health care, alcohol and cigarettes, dogs, litter and drivers.
*Due to widespread scandal (beatings, murder, corruption) on 15 April 2021 the Portuguese government declared they would abolish SEF.
