‘There’s an arrogance to the way they move around the city’: is it time for digital nomads like me to leave Lisbon?

‘There’s an arrogance to the way they move around the city’: is it time for digital nomads like me to leave Lisbon?

 

Like so many others, I moved from London to Portugal’s capital for the sun, lifestyle – and the tax break. But as tensions rise with struggling locals, many of us are beginning to wonder whether we’re doing more harm than good …

 

Alex Holder

Sun 27 Jul 2025 12.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/27/lisbon-portugal-digital-nomads-foreign-remote-workers-integration

 

For the past five years, I’ve lived in a flat in a four-storey apartment building standing atop a hill in the pastel-hued district of Lapa, Lisbon. I work from my desk at home, with a view of palm fronds outside the window as I dial into Zooms with London advertising agencies, for which I’m paid in pounds into a UK bank account. Upstairs, one of my neighbours makes money from France, and downstairs another offers financial coaching to a range of international clients.

 

In the flat just across the hallway, three Scandinavian digital creatives work remotely for clients in their own home countries. All the school-age children attend international private schools. The building, clad in weathered Portuguese tiles, is owned by a single Portuguese family. The remote workers live among four siblings, aged 60-plus, who each live on one of the floors. The building tells a typical story of the demographic of the local area: Portuguese who have benefited from inherited wealth and foreigners earning foreign incomes.

 

I’m British, and moved here from London – not for work or family, but because I could. I guess, in truth, I came for lifestyle optimisation: the sun, the beaches, the photogenic cafes. The Americans I know cite politics; the northern Europeans talk about slowing down. Andrew Steele, an ex-Olympic athlete running a health-tech firm out of the primary-coloured co-working space Lacs, talks of “less ultra-processed food” and a life lived outside. He lives by Monsanto, a forest park bordering Lisbon that is often likened to Hampstead Heath. His daughter attends an idyllic-sounding Montessori forest school.

 

What no one says explicitly is that they’re here for the tax break. Moving to Portugal pre-Brexit with my partner, an art director, and our three-year-old son, we found it astonishingly easy to become residents. As freelancers and directors of our own limited companies, we were granted a non-habitual residency visa, one of the key benefits of which is we don’t pay income tax on foreign earnings. “These visas are designed to attract a desirable alien,” explains Fabiola Mancinelli, an anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Barcelona specialising in mobility and tourism. “Applicants must demonstrate they are self-sufficient, are within a certain income bracket, have private health insurance. They’re expected to bring their job with them, so they won’t take a local’s job. And, in exchange for this, they are often relieved of income tax.”

 

We arrived in 2019, and, after 18 years in London ricocheting from interaction to interaction, the pain points of daily life softened in the Lisbon sun. Pushing my kid on the swings wasn’t so mind-numbing; even the school run was novel now we’d swapped the no 38 bus for a wooden tram, or, let’s be honest, an unreasonably cheap Uber.

 

During my last week living in London, my three-year-old son asked why the toilets in our local pub were “all greasy”, and, while I didn’t explain it was to stop people racking up lines of cocaine on the lids, something like relief moved through me as I realised we were about to leave that city and all its edges behind.

 

For a time, there seemed no downside to this decision. We strode the blue-tiled calçadas of Lisbon believing that in this sun-soaked city we could be anything.

 

Yet, over the past two years something has been stirring inside me, but also on the trams rattling past my window. A widening wealth gap. A political shift. A quiet awareness that the wealthiest residents are often the ones contributing the least. And then, recently, my unease was validated: Lisbon was named the most unaffordable capital city in Europe for housing, by Numbeo, the world’s largest cost-of-living database. That same month, the far-right party Chega, with its openly racist rhetoric, became the main opposition party in parliament. And, all the while, property prices soared, reaching a staggering price-to-salary ratio of 21:1. In some places a flat white now costs €5.

 

“I didn’t know about the tax break,” says Chris Pitney, who moved here with his Portuguese wife from north London, where he was born and raised. “It wasn’t until I’d completed a full year’s worth of taxes that I understood – I didn’t have to pay income tax on any foreign earnings.”

 

Pitney, a designer who had been priced out of buying a flat in his home city, works out of an office in Lisbon that he rents with another British designer. Right now he’s working for a New York company. “Rather arrogantly, and not really understanding the consequences, I would say casually to friends back home, ‘You should move here too!’”

 

It’s a lifestyle many incomers are ready to boast about: the best surf break in Europe, sun-drenched cafes, schools popping out bilingual children, afternoon padel games, the beach after work. Walk through the central Lisbon neighbourhoods of Rato, Lapa or Santos at 2pm on a Thursday, say, and you might wonder what the groups of men wearing vests, as seen through the windows of the sun-drenched cafes, do with the rest of their day. You might ask: who is attending the pilates studio that charges €35 for a single class in a country where 60% of taxpayers earn less than €1,000 a month?

 

“The brunch places have taken over the pavements,” Inés, a local woman in her 60s, tells me. “Foreigners will reach over my head in the supermarket, they’ll have their head down on their phone, making no space for me as I walk down the street. There is an arrogance to the way they move around the city.”

 

What Inés describes, I feel too. Two different communities sharing the same streets – though certainly not the same cafes. There are thousands of people in Lisbon who earn their money from elsewhere. American dollars, UK pounds, Angolan kwanzas, even euros earned from job markets where freelance day rates are far higher, like Amsterdam or Paris. Perhaps they’re strategists or marketers, tutors or traders, in fintech or wellness; maybe they’re producers or photographers who will fly out to shoot in a studio in New York or LA before flying back, glad to call Lisbon and its milky, cloudless sky home. Generally, their days are spent sitting at home, at a small desk pushed under a shuttered window, or in a co-workspace where all the signage is in English. These remote workers, each bringing in money from abroad, are together creating a siloed economy. Untethered by offices and with no in-person colleagues, theirs is a community separated by wealth and walled in by language.

 

“It was only when I told my Portuguese in-laws about my tax situation and saw the frustration etched across their faces that I understood the unfairness,” Pitney tells me. “My Portuguese family work longer days, earn less and are taxed more.” Even his wife, Anna, born in Portugal, had been out of the country long enough that when they moved to Lisbon in 2019 she qualified for the non-habitual residency visa and the tax break. “You can see why those who stayed are disheartened. Anna’s situation demonstrates how the Portuguese tax system rewards those who left and returned.”

 

Foreign buyers in Lisbon are paying, on average, 82% more per property than local buyers. Local businesses have responded to the needs of the rich foreigners (and I don’t mean just oligarchs, although the 4x4 Bentleys at the school gate of the international school my son attended for a couple of years indicate that they are here). Lisbon has been gentrified by people who work for advertising agencies and insurance companies. Even those who earn an average day rate for the design industry in the UK could, until recently, live lavish lives here.

 

The expected has happened: traditional cafes (or tascas), where you could knock back a 60-cent coffee, transform into gleaming marble brunch spots; branded yoga studios sit smugly on the ground level of newly renovated buildings; and English-speaking therapy rooms hide behind discreet signage in areas populated by remote workers. “The idea behind the visas is to create resident consumers, and the hope is this money will enrich the social fabric of the city,” explains Mancinelli. But what I see is foreigners spending money with other foreigners.

 

And now I, too, have a business here. In 2023, my partner and I opened a small English-language bookshop on a quiet cobbled street. For a time, the shop felt like a corrective to the remoteness of expat life – I was off the screen, chatting to locals, I had real-life work colleagues (we employ five people: two Portuguese, one American-Portuguese, two British). But still, in the morning, before I take the key from my bag to open the stubborn but beautiful old doors, it’s too easy to grab coffee from a French-owned bakery and book a class at the American-owned yoga studio. Discussions on how to be a good foreigner dominate conversation with other remote workers: learn the language, employ locals, “integrate”, spend locally. And, though I realise money spent here circulates here, there is a question that must be asked: is the money reaching local communities?

 

Some people argue yes. Chris Jones founded Paco, a company that offers executive assistance for foreign arrivals, who from €329 a month (for 10 hours of support) will coordinate home repairs, book cleaners, find nannies, pay your utility bills and assist with property viewings.

 

“When I arrived here in 2019 there were roughly 450,000 foreign-born residents in the country,” Jones says. “Today there are 1.5 million. Paco has risen from a need.” And, he is keen to tell me: “Through the company’s success we have provided good, above-market salaries for many young Portuguese staff – three of whom recently have managed to buy houses, with the combination of our wages and a government programme supporting Portuguese youth to get on to the property ladder.”

 

But there remains a sentiment among foreigners that the Portuguese workforce is a “cheaper” alternative. Alex Couto, author of the book Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon), which looks at the rapid gentrification of the city, says: “Look, I come at this topic from the left, and, though I wrote a book criticising it, I will also defend gentrification. My day rate [as a copywriter] has risen, there are more cultural institutions opening.” But, he warns: “There is something that pisses me off, when an expat in Portugal offers me a low day rate just because I am Portuguese. I’m living in the same place they are, and don’t the Portuguese deserve lifestyle expectations, too?”

 

It pisses me off when an expat in Portugal offers me a low day rate just because I am Portuguese

 

As the city changes, shop by shop, dollar by dollar, there is understandable anger. On 5 July, a protest was held outside a building recently bought by a German hotelier. After serving an eviction notice to the ground‑floor tenants – one of the city’s oldest establishments, a Ginjinha shop selling traditional Portuguese liqueur – the hotelier allegedly planned to replace it with a Disneyfied version owned by the hotel itself. As Dave Cook, an anthropologist at UCL, says: “If you go to a place to take advantage of a lower cost of living, you are hacking inequalities, and there will be pushback, politically.”

 

Though I have heard a recent Los Angeles transplant call a €1,800-a-month rental price “cute”, it’s now not only the locals who are being priced out. I meet remote workers all the time who are struggling. They’ve exiled themselves from their healthcare and state social systems, have no job security, no HR, no industry career ladder to climb. And, more and more, they are finding they have been gentrified out of the neighbourhoods they want to live in. “Work is becoming more precarious,” Mancinelli warns. “With AI, new political borders, and people risking their social security entitlement by moving abroad, we don’t know what is to come for the remote, knowledge-based worker.” It’s not any easier for individuals setting up small physical businesses, either.

 

And, unlike me, not everyone is here just because. Looking for safety from a politically tumultuous Ethiopia, Hiwote Getaneh, a podcast producer for Esther Perel and the New York Times, moved to the US in 2003. Getaneh went on to study at Virginia Tech and was in her dorm, sleeping, in April 2007 when a gunman started a shooting spree that killed 32 people two floors below her. After the pandemic, with “the US in chaos”, and having grown up speaking Portuguese, Lisbon seemed an obvious – and safe – place to go.

 

“I came over in May 2021 and was connected to the black expat community here,” she says. “I was happier here, my nervous system calmed and so I thought, why not apply for the visa?” Now, as a naturalised US citizen, Getaneh is scared of US border control confiscating her passport should she visit. She feels she must stay, “but with Chega in office and neo-Nazi rallies happening, I sense my safety is changing”.

 

This past week, my WhatsApp groups shook to life with British nationals decrying the possible increase in how long you must live in Portugal to gain nationality (from five years to 10). The change, proposed by Chega, is seemingly aimed at immigrants from the global south, who in Lisbon make up the majority of Uber and delivery drivers. It’s a move apparently driven by racism, and one that will hit the climate-change immigrants the hardest: those from Bangladesh, Nepal, India and Pakistan, without whom “Portugal wouldn’t have an agriculture industry,” says Nadia Sales Grade, a spokesperson for DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), a political organisation criticising a Europe that is “the result of a terrible system in which the rich are allowed to do whatever they like, while common people pay when ‘whatever they like’ doesn’t work out”. As she explains: “There has to be more taxation for both the corporations and those not contributing to the economy other than driving up the rent. But, more important than that, the Portuguese government needs to implement a real social housing policy and controlled rents.” She is very careful not to stir any xenophobia, even aimed at the rich expats.

 

“I don’t blame any individual,” says Diogo Faro, a Lisbon-based comedian whose political jokes tell the gnarly story of gentrification. “Lisbon is amazing – why wouldn’t you want to live here?!”

 

Yet, as I stand in Lisbon today, I feel terribly naive. Recently I sold a book to a young Portuguese man – about degrowth, of all things – and we spoke about the changes in Lisbon. “The disappointment of a dream is universal,” he told me. “Your dream is not fulfilled, yes, but mine isn’t either. And the Portuguese have both the dream unfulfilled and no affordable housing.”

 

Perhaps life should never have felt as easy as it did when I first arrived. Because, while we all agree that Portugal’s tax policies need to change; that Airbnb needs policing; that the city needs more affordable housing, Lisbon has left me unmoored from real life. I keep looking around and almost wanting to tap the walls to check they are real. Everything feels surface. On a recent Saturday I went to a small food festival held at a farm an hour’s drive south of Lisbon. Visually, it was unnervingly perfect, with children holding handfuls of carrots freshly plucked from the soil. Yet, even as I stood in the knee-high grass, an undeniable breeze on my skin, if I had been asked to describe the scene I would have used the words “computer rendered”. As the day went on, I realised why. “This farm is owned by a German creative agency,” a friend whisper-hissed over a rainbow plate of chopped vegetables. The crowd, made up almost entirely of people earning their money from abroad, were sipping natural wine, as a talk that was pitched as a conversation about farming veered into an announcement that farm plots for condos would be going up for sale.

 

The lack of integration, driven by the self-sufficiency required of the visas, means I’m not the only remote worker feeling adrift. What happens when the shared spaces of your so-called community are sun-drenched cafes and boutique fitness studios? What does it mean to never volunteer, or spend time with an elderly person, to rarely take public transport, or read the local news? It means a disconnect from the culture that shapes daily life. In Lisbon, I can’t work for a public body, I can’t retrain, adopt, or write to my local politician for change. The truth is, I’m not integrated enough to give back in the same way I take.

 

And then, last week, as tensions built, a dog visited the bookshop. Picture a cobbled Lisbon street, a curtain rippling in the breeze, revealing an arched doorway. A dog ambling along the street, stepping inside the shop, cocking its leg against a shelf of books and pissing a dark-yellow stream of urine over the hardbacks. The first time I laughed; the second time he appeared I took it as a message. Did the dog know I don’t have either the confidence or the vocabulary to discuss his toilet habits with his owner, a local Portuguese man? Or maybe the dog somehow sensed my feeling that my time here might be up, that maybe it’s time to move and make room for someone else.