I Picked the Wrong Place to Live in Portugal, and I'm Not Sorry

The plan was sensible. 

Buy a place 1 hour from Lisbon, live in it initially, and eventually move closer to Lisbon once we'd found our feet in Portugal and then use it as a holiday rental. Property people will recognise this logic. It made complete sense on a spreadsheet.

Six years later, here I sit in a tiny settlement near the beach, 20 minutes from the closest supermarket. Lagoa de Albufeira has one road in, the kind of place you'd drive past without noticing unless you already knew what was waiting at the end of it.

This is not the post where I tell you Portugal changed my life with its golden light and affordable wine. Plenty of people have written that post. This is the one where I tell you that choosing where to live here is one of the most consequential decisions you will make, and that the spreadsheet will only take you so far.

^{Beach forest trail in Lagoa de Albufeira, Sesimbra}

The Price of Quiet

I grew up in Johannesburg. If you know it, you know what I mean when I say that everything was available at all times. Restaurants, doctors, shops, spontaneity: the infrastructure of convenience was just there, humming away in the background. You didn't think about it. You just lived.

Moving to Portugal wasn't a move toward convenience. It was a move toward something harder to name. And for a while, I wasn't sure I'd made the right call.

The City Option

Lisbon is genuinely wonderful. I want to say that clearly before I say anything else. It is walkable in a way Johannesburg never was, and there is always something happening: more concerts than you'll ever have time to go to, gallery openings, culinary adventures from every corner of the globe, the kind of street life that makes you feel like you are participating in something.
If you are coming from a big city and you want to land softly, Lisbon makes sense. You give up some of the scale and pace you're used to, but not the fundamentals. You can still see a doctor without planning your week around it. You can still decide at 7pm what you're doing at 8pm. Your friends will actually visit you, and they can grab an Uber home afterwards without it becoming a whole production.

The trade-off is mostly financial and spatial. You will pay more for less space, and the property market in Lisbon moves fast. But you will not spend twenty minutes driving to buy bread.

^{Public fountain in Setúbal town square}

The Town Option

Then there's the middle ground. Places like Setúbal, or Ericeira, or any number of real Portuguese towns where actual life happens. I've spent a lot of time in Setúbal. It has a market, a waterfront, good restaurants, a population that isn't mostly tourists. It feels like Portugal in a way that parts of Lisbon, full of short-term rentals and boutique hotels, sometimes doesn't.

Towns are where you find the rhythm of the country. The café where everyone knows your order. The pharmacist who remembers your name. You give up some of the city's options, but you gain something in return: the feeling of belonging somewhere specific.

Property is more affordable, life is quieter, and you are still, largely, a functional human being with access to healthcare and an Uber Eats with more than four restaurants on it.

The end of the road

And then there is where I live.
Lagoa de Albufeira has one road in from Lisbon. I had never lived at the beach before this, so the first time I sat in a Sunday evening standstill, I genuinely thought I'd gotten my days mixed up. It looked exactly like a Monday morning commute, bumper to bumper, everyone tense, except it was a Sunday and everyone was just trying to get home after a weekend at the coast. 

Want to leave town on a sunny Sunday evening? Plan for it. Or don't bother, pour a glass of wine, and watch the chaos from the terrace.

^{Sunset over the lagoon at Lagoa de Albufeira}

The supermarket is twenty minutes away. The bigger one is further. Limited stores deliver out here, and the veggie box schemes that everyone else seems to rave about don't reach us either. Uber Eats has four restaurants. One of them is the petrol station. I have ordered from it. It was fine.

The doctor is, they say, 45 minutes. That's true. At 2am. During the day, a minor ailment becomes a half-day commitment and an exercise in patience.

BUT. 

I get to leave the key permanently in the gate. Delivery drivers let themselves in and leave parcels in the back. My neighbours have returned my dogs more than once after they bolted down the road after a cat. When I found a good bar nearby, I felt like I'd won the lotto.

Every morning I take the girls out and choose from ten different walking trails. In August, I can still find a deserted stretch of beach. Not quieter than usual. Deserted. Just us and the Atlantic and whatever is troubling me that day, which is usually nothing.

We planned to move closer to the city eventually. The quiet got its hooks in us before we got around to it.

Before you choose

I am not going to tell you which option is right. That depends on things I don't know about you: whether you have a car, whether you have children, whether you have ongoing health needs, whether you are moving alone or with someone, whether you are buying to live or buying to rent.

But I will tell you the questions I wish someone had asked me before I signed anything:

What does a bad Tuesday look like in each place?

Not a sunny Saturday. Not August. A grey Tuesday in January when something goes wrong and you need to sort it out.

Do you want to sit in a traffic jam to get to the forest? Or plan your medical visits weeks in advance?

These sound like small things until they're your everyday life. Decide now whether you can live with them, not after you've signed.

What do you actually need vs. what do you think you need?

I thought I needed proximity to the city. It turned out I needed the trails and the beach and the key in the gate. I didn't know that until I had it.

The spreadsheet matters. The location, the yield, the price per square metre, it all matters. But so does the thing that happens when the quiet gets its hooks in you and you stop looking for reasons to leave.

That part doesn't show up in the listing.

I'm Moira. I've bought and sold property in Portugal for years, and I live the reality of every decision I write about here, traffic jams, petrol station deliveries and all. If you're weighing up where to live or buy, I'd love to hear where you've landed in the comments.