(Warning: this piece is not intended for my usual readers, but as a message to the Portuguese administrative state, should it come to their attention, and prospective expats. It’s more similar to the Orbitz piece I wrote five years ago than the usual fare here.)
I’ve lived in Lisbon for six and a half years. It’s a small, sleepy city as far as European capitals go, but just enough for me. The people — especially the salt-of-the-earth working ones — are kind and honest*.
*I remember when we first moved into our way-too-expensive rental with a roof deck in Santa Catarina, and we got a local furniture repair guy to fix a broken chair. He delivered the repaired chair to our apartment and said “Vinte e cinco.” Misunderstanding him, I took out 45 euros, and he corrected me, taking only 25, even though he knew this American in the pricey flat would never have been any the wiser. And that’s the rule, not the exception here.
The weather in Lisbon is great. Maybe not the hellscape that is Los Angeles good, but close enough. It’s on the Tejo river which spills into the Atlantic Ocean nearby. You can drive half an hour and get to pristine beaches. The Portuguese have done a good job (except for maybe in the Algarve) in preserving the natural beauty of their coastlines.
The food is overrated in my opinion. There are good traditional restaurants, and I love the arroz de marisco (seafood rice) when it’s done well. But a lot of the fare is greasy and cooked in cheap seed oils.
There’s also the problem that exists everywhere of tourism and globalism dumbing down the cuisine and culture for visitors. This won’t go away anytime soon as tourism is an increasingly large part of their economy. (And who am I to throw stones, living in the glass house of being an expat and frequent visitor around Europe myself?)
But none of this is the problem with Portugal. The quality of life is good, the city has everything we need, and the people are kind, welcoming and, unlike my countrymen of origin, have good boundaries — they don’t busybody into your politics or personal affairs.
The problem is the bureaucracy. And I don’t mean this in a generic “The DMV made me wait in line for two hours” kind of way. I mean it in a spirit-crushing, holding the country back from prosperity, banana republic-level sense. I mean it in a way Kafka could only imagine in his wildest dreams.
Let me explain.
I wrote last year about the process of getting my Portuguese driver’s license, for which I had to exchange my CA license, pay 30 euros and wait six months. The six-month point was April 20, and I have yet to receive it. But not receiving my license for seven months after a Odyssean process to get it is small potatoes by Portuguese standards.
We recently applied for citizenship. We took the language classes, passed the exam, waited two months for the results, got fingerprinted at the American Embassy, drove three hours to Porto to get a reasonably soon (two months out) appointment, submitted our documents and 300 euros each to get our applications into the system.
After three months, we were able to check online for the status of our applications — 24-29 months! And that’s just for the citizenship, after which you need to apply for some kind of city residence card and only after that a passport which could take six months to a year.
But that too is small potatoes compared to what is really the problem with Portugal. I include it only to show what I’m about to write is not isolated to one part of the state’s administrative apparatus.
In August of 2020, we saw a beautiful piece of land in the center of the country, about an hour and a half outside of Lisbon. It had four acres, fig trees, olive trees, a run-down, rotting house and a small ruin. We quickly agreed on a price of 66,000 euros, cheap by US standards. I actually felt bad for the owners who were willing to part with it for such a modest sum.
Little did I know.
The deal took 10 months to close. There were six heirs to the property, some of whom lived abroad in France, and they were in their 60s and 70s. We needed to get all of them to central Portugal to sign off on it. Moreover, they didn’t have all the documents they needed, and the wife of the only deceased one didn’t want them to sell. (We discovered after yet another wasted month, her husband had relinquished his share to his siblings before he died, and she didn’t have any ownership in it.)
Finally, we closed in June of 2021. But not before (in March of 2021), despairing of ever closing the deal, we bought another property, closer to Lisbon. This property was slightly pricier and had an old house whose outside walls could be salvaged, but the interior of which needed to be gutted entirely. (There were beer bottles inside the first floor, presumably from vagrants who took the risk of the rotted wood ceilings collapsing on them.)
We figured the first one (in the center of the country) wouldn’t be too hard because it was in a sparsely populated rural area without much historic import. As luck would have it, shortly after our closing, the country reclassified the entire area as a nature preserve. In other words, other environmental agencies would need to sign off on it, putting the project into an indefinite limbo.
The second place was in a historic area, and we expected problems with the municipality. We even knew of some British people who bought there and, six years later, still didn’t have permission to remodel their ruin.
Our ace in the hole was our architect who was as local resident of the area, had done work with the municipality and knew all the architects and bosses whose sign-off was required. We drew up the plans and submitted them.
After a few revisions, an architect at the municipality decided we needed to send our application to an environmental agency because the house abutted a small waterfall. Our architects argued that wasn’t necessary because we weren’t proposing to modify the exterior of the existing structure or alter anything about its relation to the water, but she insisted. Eighteen months later, in March of 2023, the agency finally got back to us to say they didn’t need to be involved and remanded it to the municipality. She stalled a year and a half of progress for no reason.
Of course, other modifications were needed. We needed to scrap the extension to the house we had drawn up in the back yard, we had to move a bathroom away from the wall closest to the water, among other things. Our architects submitted six versions of the plans in total before having them accepted. And keep in mind, none of the plans proposed to change anything about the original structure or involved the water behind the house in any way.
We got the green light (conditionally, it’s always conditionally!) this month, but must meet in two weeks with another agency that deals with projects abutting water (even though our architects have no idea why because we are not proposing to use or modify anything with respect to the water!) and also pay an archeologist to dig under the property to make sure there are no ancient ruins or other culturally protected artifacts buried at the site. (If there are, then he’ll need to be present during every step of the construction, halting it if necessary for preservation purposes.)
Assuming the archeologist finds nothing, we can proceed, but of course, we couldn’t book contractors until we got to this point, and the high quality ones are busy until January, 2024 at the earliest.
But back to the “easy” property in the center of the country. We finally got the architect at the municipality to look at our plans in March of 2023, and she said it would need to be revised to get green-lighted. And that we had better hurry before the new rules went into place, which would make it much more difficult. So we reduced the size of the building on the stone ruin, scrapped the office, reduced the footprint of the main house and scrapped the swimming pool (for which we’ll have to apply later via another agency once we get approved.)
That we even got this in person meeting with her was only due to the luck of our architect’s partner having gone to architecture school with her — they quickly developed a rapport that likely “sped” things up.
We are still awaiting approval on that property, but even if she signs off on it, it will have to go up the chain to her boss, and her boss’s boss, and perhaps one more layer, before we have the green light to start booking engineers and contractors. A run-down property in the middle of nowhere, on which we are only proposing to build on the existing footprint, needs sign-off not only from a qualified architect but several other people up the chain.
. . .
I write this today not to elicit sympathy for me personally. That my dream of having a modest house in the country with a barbecue and swimming pool has been delayed senselessly and indefinitely is deeply disappointing to me. All told from the time we agreed on a price in August or 2020, and when the rural property will be usable, with a swimming pool, is likely five years in a best case scenario — no significant supply-chain-related delays or problems with the contractors. Our daughter was eight when we agreed on it, and she’ll be at least 13 when we can use it. Her childhood memories won’t be made there, and we’ve made peace with that.
We’ve even made peace with the idea that we might have to move before the properties are finished, might have to sell one or both (with the permits) before construction begins or right after they are completed. There are worse problems to have, and people whose plights are more deserving of sympathy. Frustrating as it is, and therapeutic though it may be to write this, that’s not the purpose.
The purpose is to convey to the relevant authorities in Portugal the damage they are doing to their own country by permitting this administrative scourge to destroy progress and prosperity. It’s like a person with autoimmune disease where the body, instead of attacking pathogens, goes after its own healthy and productive cells.
The properties we bought had been abandoned for decades. They were rotting and crumbling where they stood. The beautiful historic one near Lisbon that’s still salvageable is more than 100 years old and doesn’t have long before it will have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The one in the center of the country was overgrown, its figs, olives, loquats and black walnuts dropping to the ground to rot. I understand and support environmental regulation — I don’t think Portugal should encourage mcmansions and the unsightly sprawl that plagues greater Los Angeles, for example. We have no interest in that, in fact prefer the traditional Portuguese building style and have Portuguese architects who both know our preferences and also respect the local traditions.
We don’t pretend to have altruistic motives — we are trying to build a beautiful country house in which to spend time with each other, our now 11 YO daughter and our dog. But our projects obviously would provide work for local contractors and add value to the local area. We are the body’s healthy cells helping to repair and renovate degraded resources, and the administrative state is treating us like pathogens.
But as I said, this is not only about us. Portugal has many such rural (and even urban) properties in ruin. I had often marveled at how much potential so many of them had and wondered why no one had yet rehabilitated them. But now I understand. I understand why ours was so affordable, and the family so eager to part with it for that price.
So I want to state this as clearly as I am capable — there is no excuse for such a shoddy and anachronistic system of administering property use and development. It is a profound failure of leadership at the local, municipal and national levels. I don’t know if it’s simply a jobs program for connected locals, but if it is, your cost-benefit math is way off. The meager benefits of a steady administrative paycheck for the few is a bottleneck blocking the revitalization of entire regions.
The Portuguese administrative state is strangling its own people with rules and regulations. If I were a young Portuguese person with an ounce of ambition and creative spirit, I’d emigrate somewhere where initiative and vision is rewarded as soon as I were able.
As an American, I would recommend spending time in Portugal. It’s a beautiful country with rich culture and kind people. But I would caution strongly against moving here, putting down roots or investing oneself in it deeply. They are living off the past, a nationstate-museum to the greatness of yesteryear, a schoolmarm wedded to an outdated curriculum, a bureaucratic state that exists for its own sake and has long abandoned real-world stewardship of its present and future.
Well written. I hope some of those admin folks nationally see this.
"a bureaucratic state that exists for its own sake"
This problem is not of course unique to Portugal, although the fact that it's parasitic presence is so prevalent at every layer from local, state to federal is no doubt as you explain clearly disheartening and even demoralizing.
Here in the US, I've recently come to the realization that "The Swamp" isn't just parts of the federal government, but the ENTIRE federal government that exists solely for itself and the monopolistic business interests it serves. No doubt it doesn't even realize it's evil. Like Portugal, its bureaucrats endlessly protect their turf which means spending as much taxpayer $ as possible within their departments to justify and perpetuate their existence.
Fortunately for us, further down the food chain, some municipalities actually try to facilitate growth and prosperity in their communities and there less red tape to inhibit growth and prosperity.
It should also be noted that as much as we in the West hear about the oppressiveness of China's one-party system, the fact is their politicians, who are far more likely to have engineering rather than legal backgrounds, only retain their positions if they prove they are working towards improving the lives of their constituents. Corruption is harshly dealt with, and ineffectiveness likely results in losing their post. Is it any wonder that our major cities in the US and much of the collective West are failing apart, that unlike China, infrastructure projects such as new roads, high speed rail and other technological innovations that exponentially increase economic growth are few to none?
China is showing that if the state has the people's interest instead of its own, they can direct big business rather than having oligarchs who are only interested in lining their own pockets running the show. And it's these same greedy oligarchs who are perfectly happy to retard growth by supporting inefficient status-quo bureaucracies such as those you're experiencing first-hand in Portugal as well as our infamous DC swamp.