Moving To A New Country: Choosing Portugal

The expat life is so romantic! Going off to live in “exotic” places! Visiting someplace on vacation and deciding to stay. But then there are the stories of people who loved Hawaii, but discovered it was very expensive. Who adored France but found that living there in the day-to-day was a very different experience. Who were revivified by their trip to Thailand but found the language difficult to learn or found being visibly different from the people around them made it hard for them to assimilate.

Our decision process was a little more pragmatic.

Making the decision to leave

I had been very comfortable living in Europe while in the Army, and would have been happy to stay there, but in those pre-internet days I didn’t know how to leverage my presence in Europe to achieve that. My husband had no strong feelings either way, but as we aged, was very much aware of the political, financial, medical, and other issues that make retiring in the USA daunting, at best. Additional elements that contributed to our decision included:

We don’t have children. Missing kids/grandkids is a major reason for “expat failure” – people who leave but end up returning to their home country within 2-3 years.

We are both the sort to have a few close friends rather than a broad acquaintance – and those friends have lives and priorities of their own. While there were people who would have come if we had called in an emergency, our families and friends were geographically scattered, so we had never felt the sense of a strong local “support network”. We’ve long been one another’s support. The fear of being alone, not having resources, or not being able to handle an emergency is a huge barrier for many people who dream of making an international move.

We are both culturally flexible. I was more comfortable living outside the US than I had ever been in it. A few international journeys showed that my husband, too, was able to adapt quickly and comfortably to non-American spaces. That may seem small but it’s critical. Homesickness – missing things you don’t have or failing to adapt to things you do – is another primary cause of expat failure. The majority of Americans don’t really display that kind of flexibility – just moving from east coast to west is a huge transition for them. Moving to a place whose cultural assumptions don’t even start in the same place is a much heavier lift, and our “idea” of leaving the US didn’t become a “plan” until we were sure we could both accept a new place and culture as “home”.

Choosing A Destination

I won’t go country by country, but broadly, reasons that we ruled a country in or out included:

Distance / Accessibility. We wanted to travel regionally to discover our new space, and to have reasonable travel to the US. While we have no plans to return, family needs could call us back for a visit – and we’d like family and friends to be able to leverage our guest room for their own adventures. This eliminated, for example, Australia and New Zealand.

Citizenship Paths. Most of the countries listed offer either endlessly renewable temporary residency, or a permanent residency permit, but many don’t offer a path to naturalization. We didn’t want to be in a position where, at 70 or 75 years old, a political shift could result in the cancellation of our residence permission.

Long-Term Safety. The places on the lists generally have lower crime rates than the US and overall; expats are physically safe. In some cases, that comes with caveats such as “as long as you stay in the expat enclaves.” We also assessed the possibility of long-term national and international shifts. Bolivia appeared on some lists – and experienced a coup attempt in 2024. Belize is gorgeous – and is bordered by Guatemala, a land in turmoil whose troubles have been augmented (and sometimes caused) by American interference. For each country, we asked “do we want to be American senior citizens there?” – not just in terms of that specific country, but with an eye to what might happen on their borders.

Language. As a former military linguist, I know I can pick up languages. I also know how much work goes into doing so, how much harder it is as we age, and that it isn’t just a matter of hard work and practice – even the military tests first for language affinity, the “feel” for languages. We wanted a country whose language we could learn and learn well.

In the beginning, we thought our plans would take us to the American tropics. Indeed, we started our search in Hawaii, but that didn’t address our US-specific concerns. “Island life” looked more like Malta, an island of rich history but closely located to other places we want to see, and with easy travel ties to international hubs on the flight path to the US so family could visit us with a single plane change. But as Americans, the path to Malta is through a so-called “golden visa” – basically a mechanism for rich oligarchs to buy a passport. As it turns out, I am not a rich oligarch…

We did, however, narrow our search to the EU. Several of our finalist countries were there, and it offered a unique advantage: citizenship in one gives access to all. Choosing an EU nation offered a built-in backup plan: if we found we couldn’t successfully adapt to the local culture, we could “manage” long enough to obtain citizenship – and then leverage EU permissions to move someplace where we could be more successful.

Of those countries that remained on our list, Portugal had:

• A culture that seemed aligned with our priorities, and viable for us to be a part of
• An immigration path that we could qualify for
• A realistic path to citizenship
• History and culture that we find fascinating, which will keep us active and engaged in the world, and encourage us to travel, see, and get to know our new home.

Choosing Setùbal

Once we chose a country, there was still the matter of where in that country we wanted to be.

Choosing a region. There are lots of ways to define “region” but for our purposes, we divided Portugal like this:

• Porto, the northernmost major city. Too far north, with weather more similar to Seattle.
• Lisbon, the capitol.
• The Silver Coast, north of Lisbon but south of Porto. Beautiful but “more isolated” by our standards, with less infrastructure than we wanted.
• The Algarve, the beaches along the southern coast. Full of tourists in summer, half closed down in winter.
• The interior countryside. We didn’t feel our Portuguese was good enough for this. Other regions offered more access to English-speaking natives, facilitating our first few years of transition as we got comfortable with the language.

The capitol is expensive and bustling – a great place to visit but more urban than we wanted every day. So we looked on the south shore of the Tagus, to the northernmost cities of the Setùbal region: Almada, Azetaio, Cacilhas, Corroios, Monitjo, Palmela, Pinhal Novo, Seixal, Sesimbra, and Setùbal.

Any of them would have served our purpose, and each had their benefits. But the provincial capitol had an awesome personality and fascinating history. This last choice, we made on “feel”. We liked the way Setùbal talks about itself. It had all the things we wanted, including great connectivity to Lisbon, and a personality that attracted us. This was a bit of a leap of faith, but also the most easily changeable. If we didn’t like it, it would still be a viable base of operations for our first year or so in Portugal, and would give us time to look around and make a more informed choice later.

“Values”

Most of our veterans’ benefits, such as they are, originate in that time period: the GI Bill, VA Mortgage assistance, and unemployment benefits addressed our post-war concerns, and we left the war behind us. Our factories continued to boom as we shifted from wartime production to providing materials for the massive European reconstruction and America has focused on profits ever since.

Conversely, at the end of WWII, throughout Europe governments faced not just the tasks of rebalancing to a peacetime economy, but the need to rebuild entire towns and swathes of cities, the fact that citizens – most of them, not just combatants – had lived through wartime violence, occupation, and deprivation. If they wanted their nations to survive, they had to focus on their entire nation: people, infrastructure, economy, and social supports to ensure their citizens were capable of living and carrying out the tasks of rebuilding.

The divergence of those roads has continued for three quarters of a century. And it shows in, for example:

• Food legislation that facilitates the business of providing but prioritizes consumers. Americans who are ‘gluten sensitive’ or ‘have celiac’ often find they are perfectly able to eat wheat products in the EU. Milk is refrigerated only after opening and eggs are stored on a bowl on the kitchen counter.
  • Why is that “better”? Mostly because of the underlying reason: in the US (and Japan & Australia), eggs are pasteurized in the shell. This process weakens the shell and allows bacteria like salmonella to pass through. They’re refrigerated to keep them below the temperature at which bacteria can thrive. In the EU, the supply chain structure is shorter, and hens are vaccinated against salmonella, so the extra precautions aren’t necessary.
• Accessible healthcare. It’s true that nationalized health care everywhere is busy and it can be slow to get non-urgent appointments. Interestingly, even with those delays, they’re often faster than trying to get an appointment with your primary physician and a referral to a specialist in the U.S. Like many countries with nationalized health care, Portugal also has thriving private medical services. As new patients, we’ve been scheduled in less than a week. Our doctors give prescriptions for lab tests which we can take to any lab we prefer. The results belong to us, and we bring them back to the doctor – or to a different doctor, if we wish.
  • A medication Bernie uses runs $450-500/month in the US. We were concerned when medical folks here kept telling us it would be expensive. The three-week dose costs €6,90.
  • In the US, we’ve just had a huge victory in that diabetics who literally die without insulin can now be guaranteed they won’t be charged more than $35/month.  In Portugal, insulin is free, and the state covers the cost of needles, syringes, lancets, insulin pumps (though patients may have to wait for availability due to funding – or pay part of the cost using private insurance), and consumables. All of those items that aren’t “insulin” cost American diabetics hundreds of dollars each month. If you’re poor in the U.S., diabetes is a death sentence. Here it’s a human rights issue.
• Citizen-centered urban design. We’ve been in Portugal for four months. We’ve moved house, furnished an apartment, taken tourist side trips – all without a car. We pay €40/month for a transport pass – and some months, have not used it enough to make up the cost. Everything we need is intentionally placed within reasonable walking distance. Grocery, a block. Laundromat to put the rugs or duvets in the washer, five blocks. Veterinarian, two blocks. Doctor, same block as the laundromat. Train station, 1 km. Express bus to Lisbon, one block. Mall, 15m walk. We live on the edge of a huge park, and our apartment doesn’t feel significantly more “urban” than our suburban house on its dead-end street, a 2-mile drive from the nearest grocery.

There’s more, but these examples give a picture of the ways in which the country’s values and priorities create a different environment for its people.

Finally, Portugal is a newer republic.  We arrived just in time for the 50^th anniversary celebration of the Carnation Revolution, in which Portugal’s military overturned their dictatorship. Unlike Americans, Portugal still has people who remember what it is to live in an authoritarian regime. While not immune to Moscow’s efforts to “rally the right” throughout the west, that progress has been slower here than elsewhere, in part because there are more people who remember its dangers, and students learn this lesson in school, with former revolutionaries still present and available to visit and personalize those lessons.

For all these reasons and more, Portugal was a logical, practical choice for us. We haven’t lived through our first winter here yet, so we may learn new things about the climate or practicalities of living here during harder times of the year. But so far – we’ve been happy. It has met our expectations in every way – in part because we set realistic expectations.  We researched “down sides” other expats warned about, so we knew to expect them and were prepared deal with them when they arose. We’ve had the occasional challenge, but no “difficulties”. We’re happy with our country, our city, our apartment, our neighbors, and the life that we are establishing here.