Welcome to the Week em Breve, a wrap-up of important Portuguese news to keep you up to date and in the know.
Love for sale: getting residency through a paid marriage
The Judicial Police (Polícia Judiciária – PJ) says it has uncovered a marriage-of-convenience network that facilitated at least 60 marriages between foreigners and Portuguese brides since the end of 2023 for the purpose of obtaining a residency permit, according to news reports.
Most of the immigrants — who paid around €33,000 for a marriage to a Portuguese national — are no longer in the country, having left for other European states, the police said, according to RTP.
How much did the brides make? About €3,000 to €5,000 per marriage, according to Jornal de Notícias.
Complaints against AIMA double in second quarter of 2025
One wonders if the immigrants who married for convenience decided to leave Portugal before or after dealing with the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (Agência para a Integração Migrações e Asilo, AIMA).
Despite ongoing announcements from the agency about additional staff hires, new approaches to tackling the 440,000-case backlog of residency renewals and new applications, and the opening of new support centers, the agency isn’t loved by many of the people who use its services.
Far from it.
AIMA’s score on the complaint portal PortugalQueixa.com is 18.2 out of 100 — not far from, say, Segurança Social (19.5) but pretty far below the Tax and Customs Authority (Autoridade Tributária e Aduaneira, AT).
Moreover, the complaints are on the rise, jumping from 368 in the first quarter of 2025 to 749 in the second, The Portugal News (TPN) wrote, presumably citing figures from the portal.
Pedro Lourenço, founder of Portal da Queixa, told TPN that the jump “reveals a serious, chronic, and structural problem.”
Immigrants missing AIMA appointments are slowing the system, chief says
Not to be outdone in the complaint department, AIMA president Pedro Portugal Gaspar pointed the finger at careless immigrants: During an inauguration ceremony for a new immigration support center in Viseu last week, Gaspar said that people failed to show up for 15% of their appointments at AIMA, according to Observador.
Those who fail to show up for their scheduled appointments, he said, are depriving someone else of a possible vacancy and making them wait longer.
Gaspar did not explain how the current system, which requires everyone showing up to appointments to nonetheless still take a number from the little machine and then wait their turn, would cause the agency’s overworked staff to sit there doing nothing instead of processing another person.
284 excess deaths in Portugal during heatwave
So far this year, the soaring temperatures have not caused any massive wildfires in Portugal on the scale of the ones in 2017, which killed at least 66 people and injured at least 204.
But the heatwave that began on June 28 — Mora, which is 100 km east of Lisbon, saw 46.6 degrees Celsius at the end of last month, the hottest ever recorded on the mainland — has already coincided with 284 excess deaths, and that number may rise still, Portugal’s Directorate-General for Health said last week, according to euronews.
Over 70% of the deaths were among those aged over 85, according to preliminary data from the DGS.
The Americans are here, and more are coming, and they’re buying big expensive houses
If you’ve been wondering about a possible American invasion of certain parts of Portugal, a local real estate consultant may have an answer: in an advertorial in The Portugal News, Cristina Pereira, owner of Residential Advisory Portugal, said that Americans made up 48% of all foreigner purchases last year — or around 9,000 to 10,000 properties — and 58% in the first quarter this year.
It’s unclear which data was cited by Pereira, whose company caters to foreigners buying property in Portugal.
But her own agency has seen the ratio of American buyers go from 20% of all foreign buyers five years ago to 70% today. Where are they heading? Cascais is the “go-to” spot — with average property values of €1.5 to €3 million.
A recent survey by the journal Económico of the real estate agency Remax found that Portuguese buyers still dominate overall. North Americans were the buyers of 12% of all the 6,705 properties sold in the first quarter this year, while Brazilians dominated the market among foreign buyers, according to SIC Noticias, with 20.57% of properties.
And data from AIMA and its predecessor, SEF, shows that the number of U.S. citizens living in Portugal grew from 2,888 in 2017 to 20,959 in 2024, according to Idealista.
Portugal Sotheby’s International Realty, meanwhile, said in June that it’s going to be a good year for luxury real estate — the company has already seen a 34% spike this year in the number of luxury homes sold.
That list is dominated by the Portuguese, who bought 50% of the properties — and mostly for cash, apparently — followed by the United Kingdom, whose citizens were behind 11% of the purchases, and those from the U.S., who bought 9%, according to Idealista.
More Americans are on the way: a survey of 116,363 Americans who researched leaving the U.S. throughout 2024, administered by Expatsi, a firm offering relocation tours and expat resources, found that Portugal topped the list, according to MSN.com.
Minimum wage in Portugal well below basic living expenses
As Americans flock to Europe for a better life, many Europeans are finding themselves unable to afford the basics: a recent study by Gisma University of Applied Sciencesfound that national minimum wages can’t cover basic living expenses of an individual in any European Union country except Belgium.
Portugal is toward the bottom, according to the study, with the basic expenses outpacing the minimum wage by about €717 euros for an individual — and by €2217 for a family of four in which two adults are earning minimum wage.
