It’ll be 10 years this coming February since my wife and I first travelled to Lisbon. She was beginning the final leg of her master’s programme, and I was visiting her for the first chapter of painful long distance we’d have to endure before we found ourselves living in the same city again.
We were both wary of what we’d find here, and not particularly looking forward to it. My wife is Egyptian, and her visa application process via the university hosting her in Portugal’s capital had been an absolute nightmare. I must admit that I’d never given the place a second thought until her move. As a Brit I was naturally more inclined towards the drier Mediterranean shores of neighbouring Spain.
Portuguese seemed difficult to learn, with its closed vowel sounds a marked contrast to the musicality of other romance languages. And while Portugal’s habit of punching above its weight in football had introduced me to many of the country’s most famous public figures, my latent British chauvinism gave me the sense that this was a far-flung corner of the European continent not worth exploring. I had no idea what to expect from Lisbon.
It’s fair to say that the city looked a bit different from today in the winter of 2015. There was no craft beer in sight, and no one had even heard of ramen or “natural” wine. The only street food available in the city centre was Afonso’s traditional bifana sandwiches, and further down Rua da Madalena the queue for the number 28 tram amounted to five or six locals.
A bedroom in a centrally-located, fully-furnished student apartment set my wife back 330 euros, which was considered expensive at the time. Now you’d have to cross the Tejo river to find anything close to that price. Her window overlooked the Fonte Luminosa in Alameda, and she’d open it to hear water rushing into the pool below as she worked on her thesis.
Of course, we soon discovered piri piri chicken, pasteis de nata, and the inimitable splendour of mosaic cobbled streets lined with colourfully tiled abodes and their overhanging balconies. We fell in love with the place just after falling for each other, and decided without saying it that we’d be back one day.
As fate would have it …
That day came sooner than we might have expected. Around the time we agreed to get married, my wife was applying for PhD scholarship programmes across Europe and the United Kingdom. I wasn’t enjoying my job, and hoped we’d have the possibility to move elsewhere. While it was impossible to predict which university – if any – would offer her funding, I was secretly crossing my fingers for the one in Lisbon. As fate would have it, that one did.
Five days after our wedding in January 2018, we touched down at Humberto Delgado Airport and set forth on our new life.
We quickly discovered that the Lisbon we left in June 2015 was rapidly disappearing.
The 500 euro and 600 euro apartments my wife had regularly encountered during her previous house hunt were nowhere to be found. And Airbnbs and hostels had flourished across the historic centre, at the expense of long-term residents.
At this point in the article, it would be perfectly logical to suggest that people like us are the reason for this change. The city has now become oversaturated with young internationals from middle class backgrounds, many of whom are under or unemployed with dubious artistic or humanitarian pretensions. That is, if they’re not working remotely on salaries allowing them to pay double what locals can for rent.
So, are expats Lisbon’s problem?
Everywhere you look in Lisbon, family-run tascas and pastelarias which served communities for generations have been replaced by gourmet fast food outlets cloned from London, Berlin and Amsterdam, with stylised Americana aesthetics and faux-environmentalist credentials. Local associations are now boutique co-workspaces charging the average Portuguese weekly wage for a day’s use.
Neighbourhood after neighbourhood is being cleansed of Lisboetas, as pre-existing social problems – far from being solved – are just pushed further out of town. Public transport is being stretched to breaking point, Ubers and delivery bikes proliferate, and the trams essential for transporting pensioners up and down Lisbon’s seven hills are jam-packed with tourists throughout the day.
But being from abroad itself has nothing to do with the problem. Lisbon has welcomed migrant communities from around the world for the last half-century, which has enriched its economy as well as its culture.
When we first moved here, Portugal was still suffering from a population deficit after the so-called “Brain Drain”, a mass exodus of young Southern Europeans to richer countries following the Euro Crisis in 2011. The country needed young workers as its economy was starting to grow again.
It was happy to accept them from anywhere and everywhere.
The cost of living doesn’t discriminate
I found a job in customer service – the industry Lisbon has become most famous for in the past decade, tourism aside. For three and a half years I worked in one of the most emotionally demanding roles there is, alongside people who weren’t exactly reaping the rewards of the city’s change in fortunes.
It didn’t matter whether they were Portuguese, Brazilian, Cape Verdean, British, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian or South African. The rising cost of living in this city was weighing them down. As was job insecurity, since most of us continued to work on six-month or one-year contracts deep into our tenure.
Meanwhile, an EU-funded PhD scholarship was just enough to make ends meet in this new Lisbon, but not much more for an Egyptian whose entire family savings amounted to less than the security deposit for our first apartment here. We found that apartment after nine days of scrambling from viewing to viewing, being told by pushy estate agents that we were at the bottom of a list of 50 potential tenants, and that if we didn’t have a Portuguese guarantor we may as well forget it.
We knew it was the one the moment we walked in, though, and saw a hundred terracotta rooftops stretching as far as the eye could see from the living room window.
I must have watched a hundred sunsets through that window in the years that followed, and felt there was nowhere in the world I’d rather be.
The young couple who lived there before us said they’d put in a good word for us with the landlady, who herself turned out to be lovely. They even helped sort out our internet and utility bills for us. Lisbon is still full of beauty, character and wonderful, giving people if you know where to look.
A city of the world
During our seven years here, we’ve often felt caught between two worlds while belonging to neither. The silver-spoon brigade passing through here as part of one lifelong holiday, and the locals suspicious that we’re just another part of that brigade.
But I’ve come to realise that Lisbon is in fact, like all great cities, the intersection of so many different worlds.
From the women of Rua dos Lagares fighting to hold onto their homes to the Gulf property developer trying to take them over. From the pastelaria run by brothers who look nothing alike, to the hipsters drinking Belgian beer across the way. From the Chinese market sellers to the Nepalese restaurant owners and the Cape Verdean and Brazilian musicians hosting free jam sessions most weeknights in cavernous underground bars.
And the Anglo-Egyptian couple who thought they just might find a happy medium between their two cultures here. And instead found a home.
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Read more about Lisbon here in Dispatches’ archives.
Alex Beaton
Alex Beaton is a writer from London, UK. His published works include a guide to starting a business in Warsaw, a fictionalised account of his time living in Egypt, and a 2013 report of the political situation in Bulgaria. He has also written extensively about his travels in France, Portugal, Italy and Malta.
