Serious disadvantages and downsides of living in Portugal
Geographically, Portugal is very beautiful and I think, full of untapped potential, but very regrettably, due to the vast majority of Portuguese people being very dishonest, callous and inept, it becomes a very difficult, more like impossible, place to build a successful and happy life, as you have to fight against an immense plethora of difficulties and pitfalls that are presented to you almost every day, especially for those who want to live off the country being an active, productive and contributing citizen to Portuguese society. The more entangled and dependent your life is in Portugal, the more this is true.
No one can be someone alone.
No man is an island, as someone once said. The reality is that your success and happiness doesn’t depend solely on your efforts and capabilities, but much more on the environment in which you move. If the environment is so full of crooks and imbeciles, and saturated with so much toxic and negative energy from the Portuguese people and society as a whole, you are basically doomed to fail from the start, and it doesn’t matter if you do everything very well or not, it will never be your fault, but it will be impossible for you to succeed. In Portugal, “the game of life” is rigged against the decent, honest and most capable people, because in Portugal the crooks and the mediocre are the absolute overwhelming majority, so Portugal belongs to them, to the crooks and the idiots who are everywhere and who are always in your path, making sure that you don’t succeed, starting with the perfidious Portuguese State itself.
You as a human being and your life story is written as the result of the sum of yourself, your abilities and the environment that surrounds you, of what this environment supports you (or not), and in the end it is the environment that will inevitably have the last word on your life achievements. So it is highly probable that if you stay in Portugal you will be a nobody, no matter what you do, even if you plan, execute and work everything very diligently and well, sooner or later all your best efforts will be ruthlessly sabotaged and crushed by the rotten Portuguese environment. Just a thought, if Steve Jobs (the brilliant Steve Jobs, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of him or not) had been born in Portugal, do you think there would have been an Apple company? Absolutely not! His situation wouldn’t have been much different than; he could barely make ends meet just to pay the VAT (sales tax) on his shabby café with no customers. You can also think of any other famous and highly successful person, in any field, in the entire world, and then if you hypothetically place that poor guy in Portugal, basically that “famous” personage would cease to have ever been his/her true self (it’s called Poortugal’s shithole effect on people’s lives, turning everyone’s life into pure misery).
Only people with a Portuguese mindset can live in Portugal. That is to be a crook or a person without dreams, resigned and indifferent to evil.
No one in the world achieves success alone, you need other high quality and genuine people to help you (directly and indirectly) to be at your best and develop, as well as the support of a society that is organized, fair and where the rule of law is applied and enforced against the cheaters. Portugal is the opposite, Portugal is a madhouse to say the least. The (high) odds are that you will pay a high price if you bet your life on Portugal.
If you are a person with dreams and projects, one more day in Portugal is literally another day of your precious life flushed down the toilet without having lived that day to your full potential.
Einstein said that people only use 10% of their brain capacity. Not only do I fully agree (who am I to disagree :), but I don’t even think there is a way to put a limit on what your brain can or cannot accomplish. What I do believe is that if you are willing to apply unwavering discipline and feed your mind with healthily and good information, your brain is practically a limitless sponge, you can learn anything and always more. You are only limited by your physical health and never by your age, which in turn, if you take good care of yourself (without extremism), follow a healthy diet consisting of high quality nutritious foods that are as unprocessed as possible, and of course also practice some regular meaningful exercise, age becomes just a number IMO.
When I started my SME in Portugal, it was very difficult to find competent people in digital technologies, because there are a lot of workers for the tertiary sector, but when you need, for example, people who are good at various software (code and design, i.e.) and with deep and real knowledge of the e-commerce industry or other contemporary industries, you only get “fake” CVs, fakes, because when the candidates were on job trial, I found out very easily that they didn’t really possess any solid knowledge that reflected what they wrote in their CV. I wouldn’t say that there aren’t good specialists in these areas in Portugal, there are, but unfortunately they are so scarce and so spread out all over the country, which makes hiring this type of professionals very difficult and expensive, considering that transportation within the country is stupidly expensive, even for relatively short distances, and Portuguese public transportation is a joke because it is very poor, uncomfortable and impractical for people’s real needs.
I also avoided a lot of shady applications, so I never had any serious problems with my workers. Although they were good workers and I was satisfied with most of them, some needed regular “recalibration” in their job functions, but no worries.
The most rewarding situation I can have as an employer is to see my employees grow in their skills and productivity, but for that to happen the company must provide good working conditions in general and never treat people like machines.
Portugal is so lacking in good and specialized companies that you can rely on as really competent and serious, but even so, I have managed with difficulty to find some very few good Portuguese supplier companies, but by far for most of my needs I have had to rely on European Union suppliers.
There is a striking difference between a quiet place and a dead place. Most of Portugal is undoubtedly quiet, but too quiet for my taste, for the simple reason that its economy and society are largely lifeless.
The development of technology in the world is accelerating exponentially, which makes it really daunting to keep up with the technological advances. What you know today becomes obsolete more and more quickly, and this forces us to have a very open mind to keep learning, yet I personally find it absolutely fascinating, but Portugal is going in exactly the opposite direction, Portugal’s development is at a standstill or even regressing in the most advanced fields, Portugal is clearly not keeping up with the EU nations, undoubtedly getting further and further away as time goes by. If you want to sail on the edge of progress, Portugal is definitely NOT the place to be, but the place to RUN AWAY from!
Speaking of new technologies, I remember once watching a report on TV about e-commerce in Portugal. And to my great perplexity, the Portuguese reporter’s way of explaining e-commerce to the Portuguese public was to interview a family of gypsies who were selling clothes on Facebook!! So we can conclude that for the Portuguese in general, something as ubiquitous and important as e-commerce these days can be defined as selling trinkets on Facebook!
A very good example of this Portuguese technological backwardness is that in 2035 the adoption of electric vehicles will be mandatory throughout the EU (in principle, because in my opinion, and at the time I am writing this, it is still too early to know what the driving technology of future cars will be), nonetheless, it is impossible for this to happen in Portugal, because it would require a huge infrastructure of electric charging stations all over the country, which will certainly not happen in Portugal due to the great poverty of means, the typical Portuguese disorganization and the endemic corruption, just as Portuguese homes will never be properly prepared to park and charge electric cars.
In addition, Portuguese car owners treat their cars very badly, they do not go to the brands for service, they instead go to mechanics who are deeply amateurish and most of the time swindlers, and they never respect the service deadlines set by the brands. The Portuguese are also very fond of putting white label supermarket oils in their cars, as well as using other cheap white label products, which are extremely harmful to the longevity of the engine, as we know. All these serious shortcomings of Portugal and the very bad behavior of Portuguese car owners in general, are definitely not compatible with the mechanical sophistication and needs of EV vehicles and technology.
Therefore, one can conclude that it is very risky to buy used cars from Portuguese owners, as you never know what surprises are in store for you.
A very ludicrous example of the poverty of purchasing options in Portugal occurred when I needed a common battery with a specific designation (nothing fancy, something very standard) for a remote car key. It’s unbelievable, but I couldn’t find the damned battery anywhere other than a cheap generic supermarket brand, so it was only much later that I finally managed to find and buy a reliable brand in a famous shopping mall in the capital.
Stores in Portugal, no matter what the activity, are generally very poorly stocked in terms of quality products, as well as offering very little choice. So to survive in Portugal, it is mandatory to have several Internet accounts on good e-commerce sites, mostly foreign ones, because the Portuguese e-commerce market is also very underdeveloped, but still better than the Portuguese brick and mortar stores.
In Portugal, finding someone to do any mundane work around the house or to provide assistance, such as electricians, plumbers, handymen, cleaning lady, gardeners, etc., becomes a huge burden, a huge waste of time and a lottery, because if you hire someone directly through the phone number advertised on the Internet or through a card they left in your mailbox, you run a huge risk of being scammed, heavily extorted and given a lousy job. The only way to reduce this risk, and it usually works, is if you know someone who knows someone who may know someone, and so on, until they give you the contact details of the person who will do the job and who is trustworthy from the start, i.e. when they answer the phone the first time or only after a few weeks, as happened to me. The problem is that in Portugal anyone can practice any of these professions without any formal certification. In fact, everything in Portugal works more or less that way.
Portugal lacks many of the things that are taken for granted in any developed country. There is a dearth of highly skilled and specialized workers and support businesses. Then there’s the perennial problem of trust, because unfortunately you can’t trust anything or anyone in Portugal, including the despicable, fraudulent Portuguese justice system, where judges are the first to break the law.
If something bad or extremely bad happens to you in Portugal, you are screwed forever!
BE VERY, VERY AWARE:
Your rights are in no way safeguarded and protected in Portugal! It’s all a fallacy!
Be very careful! All of Portugal is mostly a conglomeration of scams from top to bottom!
It is impossible (and so exhausting) to try to have a life in a country where you can’t really trust anything and where there is no rule of law to make things right in case you need justice. It is a terrible thing not to be able to trust people all the time, which makes any major move extremely risky.
Nor can you, as an entrepreneur, count on the Portuguese domestic market either, because it is extremely poor. Portuguese consumers, by and large, are very low quality consumers, they don’t care about quality products at all, they don’t even know what the word “quality” means, the only thing that interests them is the price, extremely low prices, that’s why the Chinese shops are so ubiquitous in Portugal.
The purchasing power of the Portuguese is rather low, but not so much because of wages, but because the cost of living in Portugal is “artificially” much higher than it seems at first sight, mainly because of the endemic big and small cancerous corruption that steals all the money from the taxpayers and the EU funds, The impunity of the fraudulent judicial system, as well as the never-ending idiotic and self-serving government policies that are very detrimental to the daily lives of all people and the economy, which per se doesn’t explain the huge blind appetite for such bad products, without any criterion regarding the quality/price ratio.
Portuguese consumers blindly buy cheap just for the sake of being cheap.
You never want to have a business that is dependent on Portuguese customers, they will surely drive you to bankruptcy.
As well from an international perspective, you can’t be a globally competitive entrepreneur if you stay in Portugal, because basically everything is lacking.
Strangely enough, I noticed that the Portuguese don’t go out very much, as the streets all over the country, including the two largest Portuguese cities, are almost always depressingly empty of people, with some exceptions in the very few richer neighborhoods. The only places where I really found crowds of people were where there are tourists, and these are also the only places where street vendors survive and thrive because of the tourist consumption, since the Portuguese mostly buy groceries and Chinese or very cheap products. I also noticed that, very oddly, where there are many foreigners, there are hardly any Portuguese, this must be related to the inferiority complex of the Portuguese, they avoid mixing with the foreigners, which is of course a pretty idiotic behavior.
Beware, it is very dangerous to do business in Portugal! So it is better not to bring a lot of money to Portugal, the more money you have and the more you spend or invest in Portugal, the more chances you have of it being “legally” stolen in some scam (and it doesn’t even have to be a scam), because most Portuguese are born thieves and will steal your money if given the opportunity. Remember that THERE IS NO legal system and rule of law that you can rely on if you need protection, NONE, it is completely bogus, Portuguese “justice” is a fraud set up to extort as much money as possible from the victims, over decades, if you let them.
NEVER start a business in Portugal! I paid a catastrophic price, I was massively robbed by the massive corrupt country as a whole. Portugal is not a democracy, as it is ruled by an innumerable mob of crooks and “legalized” criminals who are placed in all supposedly “democratic” instances. The very least that can happen to you in Portugal is to lose all your invested money and all your precious years and then return to your country empty-handed and full of disappointment, that is, if you still have the money for the plane ticket. And this is the best scenario!
Portuguese companies are very bad payers, including state-owned companies. As a rule of thumb, they always pay late, extremely late, and that’s if they pay at all. Portuguese companies very rarely respect the invoice dates.
Generally speaking, the official financial statements of companies cannot be trusted either; they are heavily manipulated and conceal a great deal, and in any case they are not available to the public.
If you chose Portugal with the intention of advancing your personal career, you will also suffer a major setback. Portugal is a desert of good companies (except perhaps the very few large companies and a very few notable good Portuguese companies) where you can test your knowledge and develop your career. Portuguese companies are generally extremely amateurish and a desert of knowledge and technology, instead of learning, you’ll only unlearn by adopting bad Portuguese work habits, i.e. you’ll learn Portuguese tricks like “how to work hard by pretending you’re working” among many other Portuguese “work trick” gems.
The sad and brutal truth is that there is really NOTHING (good) for you to learn in Portugal.
Portugal is a third-world tertiary economy based only on very low wages and not on your skills and merits, which are not properly valued or even understood by the simple-minded and rude Portuguese businessmen, many of whom are dishonest. And if you are very talented and competent, you’ll be envied (and sabotaged) by everyone, often including your own boss, who will also be (absurdly) jealous of his/her own star employee.
The Portuguese do not take pride in doing things well.
The saying “If you want something done right, do it yourself” is truer in Portugal than anywhere else.
When I was in Portugal, there was a Portuguese businesswoman who once told me something that made me shiver and feel very uncomfortable, This businesswoman told me that I had to be “mean” to the employees. Aside from being creepy, what the hell would that accomplish? Certainly nothing good for the company or for me! Besides, it is more productive for the company to have motivated employees than scared employees. This deplorable attitude towards employees is very common in Portuguese companies.
The only thing I want from my employees is for them to respect, be loyal to and trust me as the leader of the company, and I must treat them the same way. However, this understanding only works if both employers and employees are decent people, of course.
In Poortugal, there are three main jobs that are permanently available to you: café waiter, real estate agent or Uber delivery driver.
In Portugal, there is a great imbalance between personal and professional life, which is very immoral because it means treating people like objects, but it is also not in the best interest of the company’s business objectives. In my opinion, happy employees, or rather people, are infinitely more productive and creative than unhappy people. This very wrong “work philosophy” will certainly turn the company irrelevant in the long run, because it burns out its best assets, the people.
Many bosses in Portugal mistreat their employees, forcing them to work unpaid hours under the veiled threat of being fired, treating them like company furniture, and contacting their employees by any means possible, even after hours and on weekends, as if they owned them. This is unethical to say the least, because there is time for work and there is time for our personal lives, and they should NEVER overlap, when that happens people stop being happy (and therefore stop being productive).
All people, employers and employees, should be able to enjoy both rules and tasks to the fullest if possible. As for the unpaid hours, that’s just criminal.
Work and leisure are two sides of the same coin with equal importance, because without leisure and a balanced quality personal life, you can’t be productive and creative in your career.
Gaslighting in the workplace: It is very common in Portugal for business owners or managers of Portuguese companies to engage in terroristic harassment of subordinates whom they intend to dismiss (often with the participation of co-workers), so that they have no choice but to voluntarily resign from the company in order to end the torture imposed on them; in this way, these unscrupulous businessmen avoid paying fair and legal compensation to their workers. Once again we see that laws in Portugal are nothing more than empty words on thin paper.
If you live in a country where the majority of people around you have a good quality of life and are wealthy enough to live with dignity, you have a great chance of becoming like them. It turns out that in Portugal you are surrounded by misery and abandonment everywhere. Do the Portuguese seem to you to be well-off, successful and happy people? I don’t think so, they look poor and sad. The shops? Most of them are just run down third world cafes/restaurants and cheap Chinese shops. The few storefronts you can actually see open that are not Chinese shops or covered in cardboard or dumped are poorly decorated, poorly stocked, and dirty. The facades of the buildings, including the historic ones, are also very dirty and show no signs of maintenance. Most vehicles are literally falling apart with paint peeling all over, worthy of the poorest countries in Africa. When you leave the capital it gets even worse, most of the suburbs really look like slums.
You only have to look at the dilapidated state of most vehicles on the Portuguese roads to know what kind of country you are in and what inevitable end awaits you if you live in Poortugal, literally and figuratively.
If you see something that looks good in Portugal, it is because it was paid for by the EU, like the “Vasco da Gama Bridge”, highways and so on.
I wonder what this country would look like if it was not a member of the EU, absolutely it would look (even more) like any other African country and its currency would be worth peanuts, not even the tourist areas would get away with the misery.This would be the TRUE face of Portugal and very few people would be fooled into choosing this cursed place to live. The fact that this country is a member of the EU unwittingly contributes to deceiving many foreigners and consequently harming their lives, depending on the degree of dependence on this country you are, the harder your life will be there.
Once I was stopped for about 1.5 hours in an endless line of cars that stretched the entire 12 km of the Vasco da Gama Bridge. I thought there had been a huge accident, fortunately did not, but to my great astonishment the traffic had practically come to a complete standstill for the SOLE reason that the Portuguese lemons had all broken down due to engine overheating, in the order of dozens of cars, just because the temperature that day reached 35°C. Laughable and pathetic!
Overall, Portugal is probably the dumbest place in the world.
You start to get really bored in Portugal after spending some time there, there is no stimulation whatsoever. After a while you realize how stifling small Portugal is, you find yourself going to the same places over and over again, you start to feel like a fish trapped in an aquarium because there are so few places worth going to, although I really enjoyed some places like “Baia de Cascais” and others (at least at the time I was there) because regionally Portugal is very beautiful (although its natural advantages are very poorly exploited and preserved by the Portuguese). Probably because, in addition to the fact that these places were really cozy and the nature was beautiful, there were always a lot of tourists and very few Portuguese, and therefore the energy was very positive, just the opposite of what happens when there are gatherings of Portuguese, then the energy is usually very depressing.
Portuguese State/Public Hospitals are a madhouse, very deficient and can be in some cases potentially deadly should you need their help. You can die in a Portuguese hospital for so many arbitrary and idiotic reasons, or be left disabled and sick for life. Portuguese medical professionals are severely overworked and underpaid, but often also very incompetent, and many hospitals seem to have come out of some Middle Eastern setting.
If you need an ambulance, it may not arrive in time to save your life, or people simply die in the ambulance, this happens even to pregnant women.
I think that most of the time everything goes well, but the problem is that the probability of something going wrong or extremely wrong in a Portuguese public hospital is criminally high, nevertheless I always avoided them, because I don’t feel like playing Russian roulette with my life. That is, when 112 answers and the ambulance doesn’t take years to get to you.
Health is not compatible with appointments and medical interventions that take years to schedule.
In practical terms, the truth is that there is no public/state health service in Portugal, because not only is the entire system very incompetent and dysfunctional, but it’s an even bigger fallacy because you often have to wait months to see a doctor, and if you need an operation for something urgent, they often tell you that you have to wait years, two, three, four and more… Many times people actually die of the illness while waiting for an operation.
Of course, you can always pay the private health sector, which I’m not sure is that much better, but you’ll probably have to mortgage your house to pay the exorbitant bills. Also, health insurance in Portugal is often very limited in what it covers (within reasonable prices).
The better you are as a human being (in every sense), the worse Portugal will treat you.
Portugal will chew you up and spit you out!
An episode that illustrates why it is so frighteningly easy to die or be crippled for life in a Portuguese public hospital.
Recently, the medical staff of a hospital mixed up the medical examinations of two patients and discharged one of them prematurely, causing him to die at home a few days later! The reason for this monstrosity was due to the unspeakable negligence and stupidity of the medical staff who switched the medical examinations just because the patients had the same first name, I repeat, they only had the same first name, and that was the ONLY reason this person died! In my opinion, this person was murdered due to gross negligence. Of course, being in Portugal, no one was charged and no one was compensated.
Now imagine what else goes on in these slaughterhouses of Portuguese hospitals, but nobody ever knows because it is not always so obvious or even advertised. In Portugal it is very difficult to know the truth, everything is always eagerly buried, and the reality is always much worse than what one see at first sight.
A public hospital in Portugal can be your last address. Unfortunately, it has been for so many people in Portugal, regardless of age or illness. Be aware!
Portuguese public institutions are quite disorganized and their staff can sometimes be, but not always, be very nonsensical and unhelpful. The rules literally depend on who you ask and which government department you are in. Civil servants also disagree and even deauthorize each other a lot, it seems like they don’t work in the same department or even in the same country (absolutely nuts). Typical things that take an afternoon in any developed country can take weeks, months or even years in Portugal, depending on the issue, and you feel like a ping pong ball, so you have to make a big effort, persevere and have a lot of cool blood.
When you finally manage to solve some urgent problem in Portugal, you have the odd but very real feeling that you were just lucky. Everything in Portugal is quite erratic and unpredictable, from the most trivial thing to the most serious one when your life is on the line.
Nevertheless, most of the time I’ve managed to solve all my pressing bureaucratic problems with, I’m sure, LUCK, a lot of patience and a fair amount of “redundant” locomotion.
These hardships occur not so much for individuals with trivial matters, but for those who want to do more important things.
The Portuguese government is so generous that it granted the magnificent sum of 125 euros to every Portuguese to fight the rising inflation caused by the criminal invasion of Ukraine. It was a lifesaver! (sarc.) Though money is never in short supply for the endlessly corrupt.
When you need it most, Portugal gives you peanuts!
Portuguese banks have a great tendency to go bankrupt and keep all your money. These tragedies happened so many times in Portugal, where probably millions of Portuguese lost billions of euros over time (but we’ll never know the full dimension, like everything else in Portugal), and since we’re talking about Portuguese (in)Justice, nothing happened to the (big) perpetrators. Some of these bankers who stole billions even took the opportunity to go on vacation to Sardinia, one of them is affectionately called by the Portuguese “dono disto tudo“, which translates to “the boss of all this”, but it really should have been called “the guy who screwed us all”. My advice is, if you really must, never deposit your money in a Portuguese bank, instead, opt for foreign banks settled in Portugal, but really, the best thing is to NEVER bring money into Portugal.
In my opinion, the Portuguese banks operate normally on a daily basis, but the problem is that you never know the REAL situation behind the façade and if something very devious happens you can be absolutely sure that you will lose all your money and no one will come to rescue you, like the millions of Portuguese who were swindled by so many Portuguese banks and lost all their savings, billions of euros belonging to families were lost and so many lives destroyed.
This only has to happen once to irrevocably ruin your life forever!
Especially with large sums of money! It is very, very dangerous, you run an enormous REAL risk of “losing” all your money at once in Portugal in a thousand different ways!
Portugal is a graveyard of everything; dreams, projects, businesses, lives… Nothing flourishes and everything withers and dies very quickly.
Probably that is why Portugal is a country of employees and everyone is always “á rasca” – in the shit.
There is a high probability of many things going wrong in your life if you live in and from Portugal, and sometimes terribly badly.
No one can get rich in Portugal, you ONLY have the option of becoming poor, and very quickly.
Portugal is only good, or more accurately, a paradise for two types of people: crooks and mediocre people, because crooks can do whatever they want without fear of legal and social consequences, and mediocre people because they have no competition, since Portugal is overwhelmingly made up of extremely mediocre people. However, dishonesty and mediocrity always go together, a crook is a mediocre person who steals. That’s why Portugal is a country full of evil and so sad.
Portugal’s national intercity transportation system is very deficient and very expensive for what it offers. It doesn’t encourage commuting from city to city by national transport, because there is no practical and quick access to other intermodal connections (unlike what is so common elsewhere in the EU), which forces you to overuse your vehicle, which is not good for the environment (and for your wallet), and on top of that it is very expensive to travel by car in Portugal, as Portugal is probably the EU country with the most tolls per km. In practice, you have to pay a toll every 20-40 km, not counting the mandatory bridge tolls. Adding to this, the very expensive fuel, which is also one of the most expensive in the EU, and you have a situation that does not encourage mobility in the country at all, forcing people to stay at home or just move to very nearby places.
In the end, all these very high mobility costs and the lack of adequate public transportation will “very stupidly” just severely damage the country’s economy, affecting everyone and all sectors, directly and indirectly, further impoverishing the Portuguese economy, but, alas, no one sees or cares about this in Portugal.
As far as European connections are concerned, you are also screwed if you live in Portugal, as you are literally cut off from Europe, because Portugal is a desert of good low-cost European transportation connections. THERE IS NO TGV or any other type of comfortable and practical high speed train to take you to the rest of Europe, so you are left with two very expensive options, taking a plane or driving thousands and thousands of kilometers just to reach the nearest major European city.
In practical and effective terms, European civilization ends in Spain.
Buying a new car in Portugal is also very expensive, again much more expensive than in any other EU country (we are used to it by now). No wonder that the Portuguese State, also tries to scam you when you buy a new car. Portugal is the only country in the EU, as far as I know, that charges two taxes, one on top of the other, which is totally illegal under European law. When you buy a new car in Portugal, you pay the ISV (vehicle tax) and then you pay VAT, but not just on the net price of the car as it should be, but on the net price of the car plus the ISV tax, which greatly inflates the amount of VAT to be paid, which is why in Portugal when you buy a new car, from a middle class car upwards, you start paying almost the same amount of tax as the net value of the car itself, that is, you’re paying for two vehicles, one for you and another for the Portuguese government thieves.
However, you will also be screwed by the Portuguese State crooks if you buy an imported used vehicle. Once again, you will be charged more illegal taxes in Portugal in total disregard of European law. The Vehicle Tax (ISV) levied on used cars imported into Portugal violates the principle of free movement of goods. This tax has a cubic capacity component and an environmental component, and in the first case, the vehicles are entitled to a reduction based on the number of years of use. In the case of the environmental component, this does not happen, i.e. the age of the imported used cars is not taken into account when calculating the tax. This causes the final tax to skyrocket.
As if that were not enough, there is another illegal tax levied on imported vehicles at the amount charged, called the Single Circulation Tax (IUC), which also does not take into account the true age of the imported vehicle, but instead calculates the amount of tax to be paid based on the registration date of the imported vehicle in Portugal, which certainly makes the amount charged much higher, since the vehicle is registered in Portugal as if it were a new brand vehicle! There you go, getting ripped off again by the Portuguese thieving state!
It’s amazing how the Portuguese government crooks constantly mock the EU and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The EU Commission and the CJEU have repeatedly warned Portugal (for many years) that it MUST respect European law and that Portugal is committing a series of infringements, but the Portuguese crooks don’t give a heck about the EU institutions when it is not favorable to their pockets, thereby depriving its citizens of better living conditions, in this case, cheaper cars. The problem is that the Portuguese citizens are so stupid that they don’t mind a bit being hurt and extorted to the bone, so they remain cowardly mute in the face of all this blatant robbery, as in EVERYTHING else that is so wrong in their putrid society.
Portuguese NEVER protest (against what really matters), they just submissively swallow all the thievery and insults! Portuguese people are so meek.
So what does Portugal have to do with Germany? The Portuguese are actually like inverted Germans, every character trait a German is known for, the Portuguese are the exact opposite. (as I could mention many other EU nationalities)
In addition, you cannot cultivate yourself and network in Portugal, for example, there are almost no international trade fairs and events. If you work in a field that goes beyond growing tomatoes and raising sheep or making “chorizos”, you have to fly to Europe to cultivate yourself, because nothing modern and contemporary ever happens in Portugal. In the same way, that there are almost no cultural events and shows, and those that do take place are almost always of a cringe-worthy mediocrity.
Living in Portugal is like watching yourself going dumb in slow motion due to a total absence of intellectual stimuli.
As a rule of thumb, you won’t be intellectually stimulated by talking to Portuguese, quite the opposite. Portugal is like a big village, but with cavemen, most people in the cities have the same peasant and medieval mentality as the more remote villages of Portugal and therefore lack any kind of erudition, that’s why you always hear, especially on big holidays, “Eu vou pra terra” something like “I’m going back to my hamlet”. The Portuguese really are stuck in the past.
The Portuguese like to talk about trivialities all day long, which is fine, as long as it’s not ONLY what people talk about all the time! They don’t show the slightest curiosity about more sophisticated, abstract, intellectual and serious subjects, and when they do, you hear so much preposterous and meaningless rubbish, let alone talk about and criticize the state of Portugal and its fake “democracy” that has been stolen by the crooks in power, namely in the judiciary and in politics, the Portuguese quite impolitely just shut their faces to you. They don’t care!
The raw truth is that the root of this intellectual numbness lies in the Portuguese population as a whole, who are people of very low quality.
The Portuguese are generally people of very bad character and are quite envious, which makes it even more difficult to live in Portugal, since we as human beings like and need, at least most of us, to cultivate some healthy friendships. It is almost impossible to make a real friendship with a Portuguese because you can never trust them unless you really, really know that person, which most of the time will be impossible. From my anecdotal perception, you only have a 5% chance of a Portuguese person being trustworthy and reliable, so, beware because the odds are heavily against you (very especially in serious matters or those involving large sums of money). Of course, I always prefer to trust people because it is pleasant and productive, otherwise everything becomes very stressful and difficult to accomplish, making life basically unbearable. Regretfully, many Portuguese, when they see someone honest and honorable, interpret it as a weakness and a great opportunity to take advantage of.
It is very difficult for honest and good-hearted people to see evil or even to think badly of others, and this attitude, which is the right one, could very well mean getting into a lot of very ugly troubles in Portugal.
If decent and intelligent people with dreams and aspirations mix for a long time with this type of people; dreamless, resigned, uninquisitive, amoral, submissive and with very low standards in life, decent people will inevitably tend to become like them, involuntarily, but they will, because dumb people cannot smart-up, it is the smart people who have to dumb-down in order to mix and communicate with them. There are tremendous forces in Portugal to become like the dumb masses, mainly through the passive-aggressive attitude of the people and the servile/propagandist Portuguese media, which basically turns you into an intellectual vegetable like the general Portuguese population.
That is why it is very difficult to be yourself in Portugal. The Portuguese hate people who don’t have a herd mentality like them.
To try to build a successful life in Portugal is to lose yourself, you will never know what you could have become as a person with great potential and full of dreams waiting to be conquered if you had left that cursed country. If you stay in Portugal, you’ll ask yourself this question sooner or later.
Of course, there is no perfect country, as there are no perfect people, but
PORTUGAL WILL NEVER LET YOU, TO BE YOU, TO BE YOUR BEST VERSION, just save yourself from that madhouse and get out or never come, before your life goes down the drain!
Important note: This article and all the others on this blog are not about the 5% of decent Portuguese who care and who deserve all my sympathy and I sincerely wish them all the best, because I know what it is to be a person of integrity in Portugal. Nevertheless, the reality in Portugal is so severe and so ingrained in all strata of society that I have no other way to denounce it than to generalize.
A country where criminals and the powerful are systematically protected to the detriment of victims and its citizens is the definition of a dictatorship, which is why Portugal should leave the EU.
PORTUGAL ROBBED ME €130.000 EUR AND SIX YEARS OF MY LIFE!
Your comments are most welcome and appreciated, so please feel free to leave your comments at the bottom of this page.
The Portuguese government acquired almost 100% and controls a news agency, don’t believe the Portuguese propaganda!!
Thank you for this information. I’ve heard about it and will write an article about it soon. The Portuguese state “acquired” 95.9% of Agência Lusa, but it also has a stake in many other Portuguese media, through this and other acquisitions or directly! Very dangerous! Portugal does indeed function as a dictatorship, but the dumb and conniving overwhelming majority of the Portuguese people don’t even know or care. In Portugal, most of the relevant economy is somehow in the hands and control of the state and the Portuguese governments because of the unending and very deep webs of corruption, which is either legal under Portuguese law or they turn a blind eye to it. Very few media outlets have the courage to be truly 100% independent of the Portuguese governments, and those that are already so few are likely to become fewer and fewer.
Never stop reporting the truth about Portugal and exposing Portugal. Good job👏💯 By the way, I’m a Portuguese guy, but I’ve never felt Portuguese and I left Portugal 10 years ago. (toxic mentality and passive aggressive people, impossible to live with). Portugal is the country of death. POORTUGAL culture: steal as much as you want, if I could I would steal TOO.
Thanks my friend 🙂 I will.
The blogger’s views on Portugal and its people are strongly critical, reflecting their negative experiences. My concern is the amount of time and effort use to generate such negative and hate. Simply put his key points include:
_Perceived corruption and institutional issues:_
1. Corruption within institutions.
2. Lack of accountability and transparency.
_Criticism of the Portuguese population:_
1. Accusation of complacency and silence in the face of corruption.
2. Perception of cowardice and lack of activism.
_Personal impact:_
1. Blogger claims to have been “massively robbed” by Portuguese institutions.
2. Feels Portugal has caused significant harm to their life.
It’s essential to consider:
*Personal experiences can vary greatly.
*Generalizations about an entire nation or population can be simply misleading.
*Blogs often express their individual perspectives, which may not represent the full picture but the language and hate generated is disturbing.
Balance and nuance are crucial. Portugal, like any country, has its strengths and weaknesses.
_Positive aspects of Portugal:_
1. Rich culture and history.
2. Beautiful landscapes and climate.
3. Friendly and welcoming people (according to many expat accounts).
_Challenges and areas for improvement:_
1. Corruption and institutional reform.
2. Economic growth and competitiveness.
3. Civic engagement and participatory democracy.
Now to go on and on ad nausea borders on physcotia behavior.
How SCUM is that: https://www.portugaltoday.news/article/shocking-incident-taxi-driver-abandons-elderly-passenger-in-lisbon-after-overcharging
Living temporarily in Portugal I have mailed a certified insured mail to Qatar, but the Portuguese C*T postal service sent it to the USA instead and it even cleared US Customs! But wait… what happened next has shocked me even more. After more than a month of silence, and a formal written complaint to the C*T, the online tracking has been revived and was showing that my shipment has now been sent to Bolivia in South America and it went through Bolivian Customs! This is insane and seems like an intentional act of evil. C*T must have instructed US American postal service to send it to Bolivia instead of Qatar!
I’m so glad I found this blog. I have been in Portugal for 6m, mostly with the expats in Lisbon. Expat community is mixture of boring VCs, mediocre middle class French people and clueless Americans. I was scammed out of 5k by a landlord (who is German but has been in Portugal for decades). Lawyers say there is no way to get it back I used to complain about the U.K. but it is an infinitely better country.
Although I completely agree with parts of the text, the post is too petty overall and it looks too much personalized. I expected more data here that corroborates some of your statements because, for instance, while true that Portuguese e-commerce is very limited (Eurostat shows this) it’s not true that Portuguese doesn’t have international conferences, expos when do they, given its size of course.
All demonstrably true!