It’s not just the sunshine: Why Portugal attracts US expats

The reasons for Alfreda Chandler’s move are right here, on her new home block, in the Areeiro district of Lisbon. 

The sun-drenched promenade of apartments and eateries is still considered an authentically “local” section of this increasingly global city. Across from her pink building there is a fruit stand shaded by a stone portico. Next door is a cafe with a mouthwatering display of pastries. A block away is easy transportation downtown. 

But more important to Ms. Chandler than this picturesque European urbanity is that in Areeiro, she talks to way more neighbors than she ever did back in suburban Indiana.  

“Everybody knows everybody here,” she says from her seat at an outdoor table at her local coffee joint. “Living alone in a big house – it’s isolating.”

As if on cue, a pedestrian walking down the sidewalk notices her, exclaims, rushes over for a hug, and encourages Ms. Chandler to keep practicing her Portuguese.

“See?” she says with a grin. 

For the past few years, Portugal has topped the list of “hot destinations” for U.S. citizens looking to move abroad, whether for retirement, a home base for remote work, or just a shift in lifestyle. Although Americans make up only a small percentage of the foreigners living in this country, the number has grown to about 10,000 U.S. citizens in 2022, up 239% from 2017, according to government data. 

The popular explanations for this increase often focus on Portugal’s low cost of living, along with its temperate weather, beneficial visas, and minuscule crime rate. But for Ms. Chandler and other Americans living in this city of half a million residents, the draw to Portugal goes deeper. 

The Monitor spoke with Americans living across Lisbon this past year – as well as a few interested in moving to Portugal. Repeatedly, conversations veered toward the comfort of community; the appeal of a culture with less focus on consumption and “productivity”; and more freedom from the stressors of racism, gun violence, and toxic political divisions. 

Some commentators have focused on those latter points, describing the growing number of Americans living abroad in Europe and elsewhere as a “refugee” movement. “Is the American Dream dead?” the Daily Mail asked in an article about U.S. expats. “The number seeking to escape violence and political strife in the United States is small but growing,” The Economist declared.   

But in conversations across this city, few Americans were willing to say that their new country is better than their homeland. It’s just different – in a way that shines a light not only on some of the deeper needs within the American psyche, but also on what it means to build a good life, wherever one lives.

For Brittany Wilson, the difference between her hometown of Los Angeles and her new city is most apparent on walks through her ancient yet trendy Lisbon neighborhood of Príncipe Real. 

The winding streets and cobblestone sidewalks bring her past boutiques aplenty – along with fountains and parks and older men playing cards –  but Ms. Wilson says she rarely feels the urge to shop here.  

“I just don’t have the drive to buy anything,” she says. In the U.S., she felt she was constantly ordering from Amazon. “Everything is just commoditized in some way there,” she says. “Here, you can enjoy living for the sake of it – you’re not being sold to.”  

So, she takes her walks. Strolls, really. There’s no point to them – no errands, no task list, no counting steps. She just walks to be – to experience her neighborhood, the terra cotta roofs, the pink sky between the city’s hills. 

Ms. Wilson moved to Portugal in 2021. She had been looking for a place to live outside the U.S., in part to revisit the global living she had experienced as a college student studying abroad, in part because the divisive political tension at home felt like too much. 

“It was 40% pull, 60% push,” she says.

In Portugal, she found a sense of community and slower pace of life that she now knows are central to her own well-being – wherever life might take her. Like Ms. Chandler, she knows many of her neighbors. She has found herself participating in more communal events. She even took an acting class, something she would have never done given her work schedule back in the U.S.  

And she has been making connections with both Portuguese residents and a vibrant network of Americans in Lisbon, joining Facebook groups such as Black in Portugal that host get-togethers throughout the city. 

Heather Courtney helps run that group. A U.S. Navy veteran, she says she has found Lisbon a far more integrated, and more welcoming, city than many places she experienced in the U.S. Black in Portugal has members from 25 countries, including former Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique and Angola. 

“There is racism in every country in the world,” says Ms. Courtney, who recalls stepping out of the way as a young soldier for white people walking down the street in Pensacola, Florida. “But when I walk down the street here, I feel like I belong.”

She also says she feels relieved that she is no longer worrying about her 16-year-old daughter’s safety at school. Ms. Courtney says her sister was in a Las Vegas grocery store when a person with a gun opened fire there. Even as someone who once built bombs for the U.S. military, she says she has felt a weight off her shoulders living with Portugal’s strict gun laws and a population that is overwhelmingly befuddled by the American reverence for firearms.

“I’m not worried about her being shot at,” she says, referring to her daughter.

Joe Cannon, an American who now lives in Lisbon with his Portuguese wife and their baby, says that many of the students he works with as a counselor at the international Brave Generation Academy share that relief.

“A lot of the students say they feel the U.S. is unsafe,” he says. Some have even experienced mass shootings.

As part of a Portuguese family, Mr. Cannon has a nuanced sense of Portuguese society, and of where new Americans fit into it. 
Although some news articles have pointed a finger at new residents for the uptick in Lisbon rents and housing values, most people he encounters still have a welcoming stance toward newcomers. And there are aspects of life here that he could never have imagined living in Los Angeles, from Lisbon’s walkability to its culture in which striving and work take a back seat to togetherness and tradition.

At the same time, he says, those same cultural traits can lead to overwhelming bureaucracy and cultural stagnancy – something that can send Portuguese young people scurrying abroad themselves.  

This is why he sees himself as more of a “third culture” person than as an American expat; he hopes to use his home base in Lisbon to travel widely with his young family and to learn what new places might teach him. Wherever he goes, he says, he expects that there will be parts of the U.S. he will always crave.

“I miss In-N-Out every day,” he says of the burger chain. 

There are some parts of home that are irreplaceable. 

Catarina Fernandes Martins supported reporting for this article.