Why international families are turning to Portugal amid global uncertainty

That's according to Nuno Sanches, partner and head of operations at Cascais Ventures, speaking on a panel at the Portugal Investment Forum in Quinta do Lago.

Sanches said he gets “an early peek at where the shift in nationalities is coming from”. “We’re looking at people who are building their Plan B, which then becomes Plan A, and then they come forward,” he said.

He pointed first to American arrivals, referring to “the ascent of the American”. Sanches said the group is “well-explored” and that “they come for a variety of reasons”.

A second group, in his view, is linked to the Middle East. Sanches described the crisis in the region as “the biggest opportunity to capture a geographical wealth transfer probably in our generation”.

He said that for 50 years the region had been “the safe harbour for an enormous footprint of people who have amassed massive wealth”. The people he is now seeing are mostly Egyptians, Lebanese and Jordanians who built lives in the Emirates. They “do not have nationality, which is almost impossible to get”, he said, and had assumed it was the place to raise their children. “That assumption is shattered,” he said.

A third group sits along what Sanches called “what I think of as the Silk Road”, excluding China. It includes northern India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Iranian diaspora, who he said traditionally gravitated to the Middle East and are “now looking for alternatives”.

Sanches said these arrivals tend to have a less established network in Portugal. “These people will need to be received and integrated into investment networks and social networks,” he said.

“I don’t hear this opportunity discussed enough in forums like this, so I thought I’d share it as a forward-looking perspective,” he added.

Paul Stannard, chairman and founder of Portugal Pathways and the Portugal Investment Owners Club, who moderated the panel, said the club hears similar stories from newcomers. He recalled people saying they wanted to spend time in Portugal but “I don’t know who the foxes are and who the hens are, and I don’t want to spend 15 years to find out.”

“That transfer of huge amounts of wealth wants to find a safe landing with flexibility,” he said.

Fellow panellist Hugo Vau, whose Atlantic Giants project is based in Nazaré, said “almost everyone I know abroad wants to come to Portugal at some point”. He cited “good food, good people, safe place, beautiful landscapes” as part of the appeal.

For many international families, residency is one of the first questions to come up when Portugal is under consideration. The Golden Visa is among the routes they most often look at, and the rules have changed in recent years.

To understand how the Golden Visa residency-by-investment programme works today, get in touch with the Portugal Pathways team.

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