Portugal is fine if you're very wealthy or retired, but unlivable for anyone else

Listen, my husband and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Portugal. I’m Italian, he’s Russian, and Portugal was the only country in the EU willing to let us stay there without marrying immediately.

However, I can’t in good conscience suggest people stabilize there, and we left as soon as we could.

Portugal makes sense if:

• You’re very wealthy (not talking middle class here, REALLY wealthy) and practically above all money issues. Meaning, you can live your entire life hopping from private service to private lawyer and not break a sweat

• You’re a retiree. If you’re looking for a chill, calm, mostly safe place to retire, it can still be a pretty good option

Can’t think of many other reason to choose it over many other EU countries. These are the main issues I found:

• Making Portuguese friends is very, very hard. I was 23 when I moved there, and most people that age in Portugal are still in school thinking about how fast they can leave the country. It was practically impossible to talk about anything serious, and when it was, the conversion quickly shifted to how privileged I was, how rich I was, and how I’m destroying their country. Both in real life (including at doctor offices, board game events, any place you can think of even when the topic wasn’t brought up at all) and online
  

• Nothing ever changes. If you hate something now, you can be confident it’s gonna stay that way for the foreseeable future
  

• The biggest one for me… the absolutely insane lack of accountability in public buildings. It took us 2 YEARS to get my husband’s permit. It should have taken a couple of months. In the meantime, he literally couldn’t leave the country for any reason as he’d been illegally entering the Schengen area. Portugal created a legal framework where an immigrant can only stay in Portugal, and not the rest of the EU (which is against EU regulations, btw).
  
  We weren’t married then, and he applied for a remote worker kind of permit. They never called. We had to ring them 1000+ times (not an hyperbole, I MEAN IT) and beg them to do what their official policies said they should do. They made us travel for HOURS on end to different places in the country, including a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, treated us like shit, and booked 45 people for 3 real available slots multiple times meaning almost everyone needed to rebook. It was excruciating and fake all the way through, given he got a permit he didn’t even apply for because it was the only way to get a legal permit to stay in the country. Utter insanity. And that’s true for hospitals, doctors, any business. It makes it so, so hard to build and do anything.
  
  Just to give you one last example: the official ministry of immigration of Portugal, a first-world EU country, managed the immigration appointments by announcing new slots are open on the Facebook page. No, I’m not joking. Whoever calls first gets it, like a game show, and we had to pay a freelancer to call back until someone replied because we couldn’t spend hours waiting for someone to pick up. Mind you, if they don’t pick up, there’s no waiting queue - you literally have to call until someone actively picks up the phone. They don’t know what a queue is.
  

• The scam of “awesome quality of life”. Imo, many people drastically overestimate how great the quality of life in Portugal is. First of all, if you’re a local with a local salary, your life there will suck. Portugal is poorer than nearly all of Eastern Europe and the salaries for highly qualified professional are a laughing stock of the entire world. There are waiters in the EU and US making more money than doctors in Portugal. It is absolutely ridiculous, hence why all young people leave and the only ones left are the ones that physically couldn’t leave. Second of all, even if you do have a great income, great home, etc. there are still soooo many other EU cities where the hospitals work, emergency services are real, business owners can answer an email, and the gov takes responsibility. I don’t see anything particularly special in Portugal that you wouldn’t get in other countries (other than NHR, but that’s gone now).