Welcome to the Week em Breve, a wrap-up of important Portuguese news to keep you up to date and in the know.
Faster times for golden visas
Those rich enough to have bought their way into Portuguese residency have something to celebrate: processing times are speeding up for golden visa applicants, many of whom have had to wait for months and even years to get their residency status based on investments or — much, much more likely up until it was no longer allowed — real estate acquisitions.
The Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (Agência para Integração, Migrações e Asilo – AIMA) has about 45,000 to 50,000 pending golden visa applications — and those cases can be “migrated” to the agency’s online system, according to Bloomberg.
“This is good news for investors,” Bettino Zanini, an immigration lawyer at Lisbon-based FiO Legal, told Bloomberg.
Among the various measures to speed up the process are automatic appointments for biometric data collection and the acceptance of untranslated documents in English, Spanish, and French, the lawyer said, according to Bloomberg.
Pending AIMA caseload before courts rises from 575 to 46,824
Not such great news for a lot of people awaiting legal decisions on their cases, meanwhile: the Lisbon Administrative Court finished 2024 with 46,824 pending immigration and asylum cases related to AIMA, Lusa reported, citing the 2024 Report of the Administrative and Fiscal Courts of Lisbon and the Islands.
That’s up from just 575 at the end of 2023.
An author of the report said that’s at least partially because of the closing of the much-maligned Foreigners and Borders Service (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteirasa – SEF) and its replacement by AIMA in 2023, which has led to the use of many more “human resources that could be used in other ways.”
Ai Weiwei told, ‘This is Switzerland, not Portugal’ when trying to enter Switzerland with Schengen visa
Finally, if you, like many Atlas readers in the past, have been wondering whether it’s ok to travel with an expired Portuguese visa in your non-EU passport as you wait for AIMA to pick up the phone to schedule your visa renewal, and have been told that it’s ok to travel on such a visa because AIMA has automatically extended the validity of visas for six more months because of the unceasing backlog of cases, the answer is, probably not to Switzerland, as the Chinese dissident artist and media brand Ai Weiwei found out last week.
Weiwei, who’s been based in Portugal for several years, posted on Instagram that he was denied entry to Switzerland — a Schengen signatory — on his Schengen visa issued in Portugal, according to Artnet.
Apparently, on seeing the visa, a border agent at Zurich Airport told the artist, “This is Switzerland, not Portugal,” according to news reports.
Portugal to build two new detention centers for illegal immigrants
The Public Security Police (Polícia de Segurança Pública – PSP), which will oversee the new centers, plans to erect them for about €30 million using funds in the Recovery and Resilience Program (Programa de Recuperação e Resiliência – PRR), the years-old initiative in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Público.
The centers will be able to hold 300 detainees, with one already planned in Lisbon’s Odivelas municipality and another in a yet-to-be-determined locale in the north of Portugal.
Público cites Eurostat data showing that Portugal expels fewer immigrants than any EU country other than Slovenia. From July to September, Portugal issued expulsion orders for 120 people. Slovenia did 80 — while France did 30,800, or more than a third of the 112,335 total for the EU.
Lisbon’s Cais do Sodré neighborhood to get dozens of CCTV cameras
Fans of urinating on the street and buying fake drugs from street dealers will have a harder time getting away with it in Lisbon’s previously grungy but now boutique hotel-friendly Cais do Sodré neighborhood: in all, 30 video surveillance cameras are being installed in the area, Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas said last week, adding that this initiative was to ensure that Lisbon “continues to be a safe city,” according to CNN.
The mayor last month claimed crime was rising in Lisbon. PSP data, meanwhile, showed that general crime was down 12.6% in 2024 compared to 2023, while violent and serious crime fell by 10.41%, CNN wrote.
Since these figures began getting attached to his statements, Moedas said something that can be roughly translated as this: “If the security numbers are verified, obviously I am the first — and everyone here — will be very satisfied, but the numbers have to be looked at carefully, that is, we cannot look at a decrease in a certain value on average without looking at what is within that number, that is, what really decreased in safety,” according to CNN.
Got that?
Tuktuks banned from hundreds of Lisbon’s streets
Speaking of quality of life, Lisbon City Council (Câmara de Lisboa) plans to bar tuk-tuks from 337 streets starting April 1, primarily in the historical center of the city, according to Público.
Unsurprisingly for anyone who’s lived here for more than two weeks, no one apart from the association of tuk-tuks seems to have a problem with this idea.
No more trikinis outside the beaches of Albufeira
While Lisbon struggles to combat rising and/or falling crime rates and tuk tuks, the famed cultural capital of the Algarve that is Albufeira is dealing with a different set of issues.
The city is drafting a new law that would make wearing a bikini, or trikini, for that matter, or not wearing a shirt away from the beach punishable by fines of between €300 to $1,500.
Which, whatever, fine — but it was the other types of prohibited behavior included in the proposed law that brought back fond memories of summer evenings in that coastal haven:
- “Remain or circulate in a state of complete nudity” … or “using any type of clothing or prop, circulates or remains with an exposed sexual organ”
- “The practice or simulation of any type of sexual act, individually or not”
- “Urinate or defecate”
- “Spit”
