park car in Lisbon parking lot, it's cash only, so take out minimum cash at ATM possible which is €10 but parking only accepts €5 or coins, I ask why, and I get scolded for not reading the paper on the machine, but I did read the machine, I just ask "why" but he can't answer except for scolding me, then try ask for change outsidd but of course no shop wants to give me €5 euro change so I have to buy water somewhere for €1.70

I moved to Portugal on a startup visa. I handled the application, got the approval, obtained the visa at the consulate, and came to the country — everything on my own. And now I can't get a residence permit on my own — on a visa that is supposed to automatically mean I'm entitled to one. And I can’t even get it with the help of the local lawyers! My criticism falls into two categories: the startup visa as an entrepreneurship program, and how it works after you arrive in the country. The startup visa as an entrepreneurship program: It doesn't encourage relocating existing businesses. Although that category exists, it's nearly impossible in practice. People invent non-existent projects, get approval for them, and then relocate teams and products that are already making money and paying taxes in other countries. This seems fundamentally contrary to the program's intent. It's administered by a dubious agency. IAPMEI has no experts capable of properly assessing the viability of ideas or companies. They evaluate whether what's described in the application formally satisfies spoken AND unspoken internal rules — regardless of whether what's written is actually feasible, makes sense, or reflects how a business should be run at an early stage. It's also a very closed-off agency — it's essentially impossible to reach anyone there by phone. There are only two known email addresses: [email protected] and [email protected] — both are generic. Emails to these addresses can be ignored indefinitely. It substitutes real incubation with coworking rentals. Program participants pay around €1,000 a year for a desk in an open-plan office. That's all they get. They say some incubators are better: that organize useful events, provide access to valuable networks, or can offer practical advice and legal consultations. But most of the accredited so-called incubators do nothing of the sort for their residents. And if they're supposed to — they often just fabricate the reporting. The startup visa as an actual visa that's supposed to let an entrepreneur obtain residency: it doesn't work — because of AIMA. What I ran into: AIMA and IAPMEI contradict each other on the required documents. For example, AIMA's website lists NISS (the social security number, marked as optional), while IAPMEI insists that NISS is not required under any circumstances. AIMA offices don't care what's written on their own website. In addition to NISS, across four attempts to submit documents, I was sometimes asked for — and sometimes not asked for — the following: an apostilled master's degree with an English translation; an apostilled criminal record certificate no older than six months from the country of origin with an English translation; proof of arrival in the country (obtained from the police, though a hotel booking might work — they refused to accept a passport stamp); registration as a sole entrepreneur; invoices issued as a sole entrepreneur; proof of company incorporation (impossible without a residence permit); a contract with the incubator in Portuguese (they refused to accept it in English) — none of which appears on the document list on their website. Once the officer literally said: “I know what you’re trying to say me. But in this office we require those documents not listed on the website. If you’re so smart, apply in another office on another day“. AIMA staff don't know their own laws. But they can't admit that in front of an immigrant. They might reluctantly admit it in front of a Portuguese-licensed lawyer. AIMA offices likely have internal, non-public instructions that contradict the law. The mechanism for appealing AIMA decisions doesn't work. The only viable option is to go to court — but that can only be done with a Portuguese-licensed lawyer. AIMA staff refuse to issue any documentation — for example, confirming that they refused to accept my application due to the absence of NISS. AIMA staff issued me a notice to voluntarily leave the country within 20 days, on the grounds that I am in the country illegally and failed to provide documents to regularize my status — despite the fact that I had provided all the documents required according to their website, provided several additional documents beyond that, and in lieu of NISS had provided a rejection of NISS from the social services office, because I am not entitled to have one. And despite the fact that I had a valid visa. On top of that, the staff were pressuring me to sign this document, misleading me that it was not a refusal and that no one was making me to leave the country. I'm not giving up, and I will get what I'm owed from this government. But in the meantime, I feel like I'm dealing with fraudsters.

arrive Lisbon Airport and non-EU arrivals is hours wait, while EU arrivals is a highly retarded 20x zigzag line

Our friend manages properties here in the Algarve. Apparently, they’ve recently introduced a new rule. Want to paint your home? You'll need a licence for that. Please supply: • Photos of your home with the area for painting highlighted • Estimates of the paint quantity required • Details of the painter and their licences LICENCES. FOR PAINTING. ‘Oh, your nephew planned to paint your home for pocket money?’ ‘See you both in court.’

see gf order glass mirror and the FedEx Portugal delivery driver threw it over the fence

Cash-only businesses, fine, that's a choice. But how about the ones that only take MBWay or local Portuguese cards and refuse anything else? Are you actually doing the math, business owner? The 1% fee you might be saving is absolutely dwarfed by the volume of business you're leaving on the table from foreigners, tourists, and anyone with a non-PT card. This is particularly absurd at places like 5àSec. You're the largest dry cleaners in Lisbon and you operate like a small corner bakery. Why? Just accept normal cards like every other developed country.

If you're a foreign parent and your baby is born in a private hospital in Portugal, your newborn is not pre-registered. You have to physically go to a Conservatória within weeks of birth to do it in person. That means taking a baby that's only a few weeks old into a confined, packed government building full of sick people. Objectively the last place a newborn should be. In our case both parents are legal residents with Chave Móvel Digital et al. The hospital already sends the birth notification electronically to the IRN. The state already has everything it needs. We still had to queue in person with a newborn. The fix: Auto-register these births using the electronic notification the hospital already sends. Let both parents confirm the registration online with Chave Móvel Digital when they're already in the system. At minimum, send a registrar to the hospital before discharge. Portugal already runs Chave Móvel, e-fatura, Portal das Finanças, Via Verde. There's no reason a newborn should be exposed to a Conservatória waiting room for something the state could resolve in one API call.

This is one of my biggest gripes about Portugal. The culture around obnoxiously loud cars and bikes, 95% of the time it’s bikes though. It’s cool when you’re 16, not when you’re an adult. A lot drive like maniacs, have straight piped exhausts which break all national laws and the Police/GNR do fuck all about it. I literally live next to the GNR on a 50km/h road and bikes accelerate to over 120km/h 24/7 in the middle of town in a pedestrian heavy area. Super dangerous and everyone hates it (the Portuguese included) yet the authorities do nothing.

I’ve been living in Portugal for over five and a half years under the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. Like many Brits who built a life here before Brexit, I stayed, integrated, paid taxes, and followed the rules—on the understanding that after five years of legal residence, I would be entitled to permanent residency under Article 15. That milestone came and went. From that point on, I did what anyone would do: I contacted AIMA repeatedly, asking how to formalise my permanent residency status. Weeks turned into months. Emails went unanswered. The process felt opaque, inconsistent, and—at times—non-existent. Meanwhile, my life didn’t pause. I run a business that works closely with suppliers in Vietnam, particularly around Hanoi, and I had relocated there temporarily to oversee the expansion of a warehouse operation. It was a key moment for the company—growth, logistics, new infrastructure. But at the same time, I was stuck in limbo with my residency status in Portugal. Eventually, after persistent effort, I secured what I believed was an appointment with AIMA in Cascais. So I made a decision: I flew back from Vietnam to Portugal specifically to attend it. This wasn’t a casual trip. It meant interrupting ongoing work, long-haul travel, and significant personal cost—all to attend an official appointment that would finally move things forward. I arrived in Cascais, went to the AIMA office, and checked in. They had no record of my appointment. After speaking with staff, I was told—very matter-of-factly—that my appointment had been rescheduled to May at the Lisbon branch. No notification. No email. No message. Just changed. I was standing there, having flown halfway across the world, being told to come back another time. That moment summed up the experience perfectly. What makes this harder to accept is the broader context. Many of us stayed in Portugal post-Brexit with a long-term plan: integrate, qualify for permanent residency, and eventually apply for citizenship. It was a clear, structured path. But now, with proposed changes to nationality laws extending timelines significantly, that path has shifted. What was once a five-year horizon is now potentially ten years or more, with processing time on top. For people who made life decisions based on the original framework, that’s not a small change—it’s a fundamental one. And yet, even before reaching that stage, we’re struggling to access the most basic administrative step: recognition of permanent residency rights that already exist under international law. To be clear, the issue isn’t just bureaucracy—it’s uncertainty. Appointments appear and disappear without notice Communication channels rarely function Legal rights exist on paper but are difficult to exercise in practice Portugal is a country I chose to build my life in. I’ve invested here, paid taxes here, and contributed to the economy. I still believe in that decision. But experiences like this make it difficult not to question how secure that foundation really is. I’m sharing this not out of frustration alone, but because I know I’m not the only one. There are many others in similar situations—waiting, chasing, unsure where they stand. All we’re really asking for is clarity, consistency, and a system that reflects the rights we were told we had. At the moment, that feels a long way off.

The title is not a very prosaic one, but I hope it gets the message out loud and clear. I’ve been living in Porto for three years now and this has been a persistent issue. From my observation, it is still a very small minority of owners who don’t clean after their dogs and are, in fact, consistently terrorizing their neighborhoods. What makes it worse is that the rest of their neighbors are ignoring the problem instead of treating it is as a public health issue. This includes the city officials who are doing nothing to post signs in the streets where such practice is common and enforce the existing laws. They probably have the streets around the touristy city center cleaned more often and that is about it. It does not take a PhD in medicine or biology to figure out that there are no differences between, say, dog’s and their owner’s shit. There are small children and elderly with compromised immune systems walking these same sidewalks decorated with feces. Besides just being an annoying and smelly thing that can ruin your afternoon, dog feces can contain dangerous parasites that can fuck you up for the rest of your life. I hope I am not coming across as yet another spoiled estrangeiro busy taking care of his paradise. I lived in NYC for decades, the place that has had vast variety of crime, health and cleanliness problems, but amazingly dog shit was not one of them. One of my favorite stories was from my german friend who was visiting me and told me: ‘I was just walking around the neighborhood and saw this 2m tall guy, all muscle, gold chains, gold teeth, walking his dog, bending down and picking the shit up’.

Why are so many of my fellow foreigners expecting top-notch quality public services in Portugal, particularly medical ones? Many have just arrived and have contributed little or nothing to them. If the average Portuguese can't get quality service, why should we? I honestly believe all foreigners should be required to have private health insurance, and if you can't afford it, you shouldn't be here at all. We shouldn't be a drag on a system the locals are already struggling with. Only in Portugal are foreigners complaining about something they're getting for free.

Our son can't get his first Cartão de Cidadão digitally, fine. We found a SIGA appointment on the other side of town, went there, everything went smoothly. Then the letter with the PIN never arrived. We went to the Conservatória where the card was waiting. The card was there, but without the PIN they can't hand it over. OK, an error, whatever. Requested a 2nd via, waited for a new PIN. That one never arrived either. We always get CTT mail normally, no issues with our address. The problem is the IRN sends these letters non-certified to save money, so there's no tracking, no way to know where the letter is or whether it was ever sent. The suggestion from the staff was to physically go to the CTT branch, ask them to hold any future IRN letter, and hope. We then went back to the Conservatória to try again. Waited hours. The fichas ran out, even the priority ones. We bailed. Eventually we went to a big Loja de Cidadão, paid 50 EUR, and got his Cartão de Cidadão with PIN codes create at the IRN HQ in Parque das Nações. Why wasn't this option offered at any point in the previous 5 to 15 hours we spent on this? At 50 EUR for what we went through, it's a steal. The fix: Send PIN letters as registered mail with tracking. The cost of the certified mail is nothing compared to the citizen hours wasted and the load on Conservatórias. Allow PIN delivery via Chave Móvel Digital or the parents' authenticated identity, since both parents are already in the system. When someone reports a missing PIN, proactively offer the paid same-day option at the IRN instead of letting them spend weeks chasing a letter that may never come. There are plenty of ways to confirm an address that don't depend on a non-trackable physical letter.

October 2024, ASAE inspectors found 100g of dry-frozen meat (freezer-burned, not spoiled) at the bottom of my restaurant fridge. A simple fine would've ended it. Instead, they filed a full court case. I sold the restaurant over a year ago and I'm STILL being summoned to hearings in 2026. Next court date: August 2026. Over a piece of forgotten, perfectly frozen meat. Make it make sense.

Today we went to AIMA to extend our residency certificate (which you need to do after 5 years here). Firstly, we couldn’t do it in Lisbon because the waiting lists there are many many years (!) So we went to a place in the middle of nowhere. The state of government offices here is just ridiculous, especially considering how much tax you pay here: 23% sales tax, ~32% effective corporate tax and 48% over €86K per year, it’s high by any standard. But they can’t pay for offices to look even somewhat maintained. Then where is that money going? A true disgrace.

Europeans who arrive in Portugal have to register to get a Certificiate of Residency in EU (CRUE). You need that document for many things like opening a bank account or getting a driver license. You get it by going to the local municipality and registering there. I did it with a lawyer. It’s actually complicated because you need a local in the neighborhood you live to vouch for you. Anyway it’s valid for 5 years then you need to renew it. Or you can’t do anything in Portugal anymore. Because you can’t get an ID card eiher, the wait list for that is many years. So to extend your CRUE you have to wait many years in Lisbon, so lawyers instead send you to villages in the middle of nowhere, like Santarem where I had to drive today 3 hours drive to and back to extend a piece of paper. All of this could have just been an online site or app. But instead they made it an ordeal.

see table arrived broken then gf sent back for replacement and then the replacement arrived broken too

Arrive at parking in Lisbon and as usual the electric chargers are cordoned off and broken, they’re always broken everywhere! Why???

I applied for a NISS online last month. This is the number you need to PAY PORTUGAL social security. I never got a email confirmation of approval/status so I found a website page that gives me the status. For that I need an ID of the application. Unfortunately the ID is only provided ONCE. That is after completion. If you close that page you loose that ID forever. No confirmation email, nothing. I called social security number asking for help and the only answer they could give me was to submit a NEW request for a NISS. When I asked whether the old request will get buried and new one becomes the active one she DIDNT KNOW! I said “this sounds ridiculous, are you sure there’s no other way around this or a phone number I can call?” And she said “no, this happens all the time where people loose that ID, there is no solution to this that I can 100% confirm” The main hotline for this matter doesn’t even understand their own systems! I am trying to pay them, and they don’t want my money! Hahaha

So we had new ACs installed in our house. Then a few weeks later we heard a sudden POP and fire smell. It comes from the breaker box and we check and it’s flooded with water. The AC guy had installed the outdoor unit on the roof with an tube that ran the electricity for it down into the house. Anyone knows you should install that tube horizontally or better with an S shape so water can never get in. He didn’t. Rain water flooded our breaker box and short circuited everything. The breakers all melted away! Very dangerous too. Our electricians came to fix it as an emergency, they were shocked by the level of amateurism. When the AC guy also came, the electricians were as polite as they could be but essentially politely said “what the fuck did you do”. In a true classic of Portuguese culture, the AC guy did NOT take responsibility and said it was not his fault and not his problem and brushed it away. We had to pay €900 to replace the breaker box, the wires, and all parts completely. The AC guy wouldn’t pay anything nor take responsibility. “It happens”. Later when we asked the AC guy to do more work (we don’t have much choice in Portugal, there’s a shortage of workers, so good luck finding another AC guy that actually shows up), we asked him for a discount because he flooded our breaker box for €900. He said okay I will give you a €300 discount for it. 😂😂😂

This is so insanely dangerous. Portuguese drivers on the highway I’d say in 2/3rd of cases do not use the blinker to switch lanes. They just switch lanes, and often without checking. It’s super dangerous and makes me jump on the brakes constantly. Even worse you get anxiety from it because you know a Portuguese at any moment might switch lanes into to your lane without announcing it with their blinker and often without checking their mirror. Some of the worst drivers in the world.