AIMA says it's getting better. Is it?

A statistic about AIMA that sounds like good news, and might not be. It's Monday, 21 September. Thirty-two degrees. Air quality: 62 (Moderate). Here's what you need to know.

🗞️ AIMA COMPLAINTS HAVE HALVED. THE QUESTION IS WHY.

Complaints against AIMA, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum that so much of this newsletter's audience has to deal with, have fallen to about half what they were in 2024. The agency's president, Pedro Portugal Gaspar, presents this as clear proof that things are getting better: fewer complaints, even as AIMA handles more people than ever, more than 600,000 appointments and over 500,000 residence cards in the past year. He concedes errors still happen, wrong addresses on cards, mistakes at that volume, but reads the overall decline as a sign the system is improving.

The union that represents the agency's own migration technicians reads it very differently, and its question is a sharp one: are there fewer complaints because the experience got better, or because it got harder to complain in the first place?

The STM, the migration technicians' union, points to unanswered emails, jammed phone lines, and long waits with no clear resolution date. If people cannot reach AIMA to lodge a complaint, a falling complaint count is not success. The union says some residence permits still take too long to arrive, some applications sit pending indefinitely, and some offices are understaffed, operating at limited capacity, or closed altogether. It also questions AIMA's growing reliance on the CLAIMs, the local migrant integration support centres, to do work it thinks the agency should be handling directly.

There is a second complication, and it cuts against the headline. The independent complaints platform Portal da Queixa recorded the opposite trend: 643 complaints against AIMA in the first four months of 2026, up 8.43% on the same period in 2025, rising to 740 by late May. The two data sets are not strictly in conflict, they track different complaint channels, but together they make it very hard to use one number as proof of anything.

So what should a foreign resident take from this? Not the headline in either direction. The union's proposed test is the honest one, and it is the one that actually matters to you: forget the complaint totals and look at how long it takes to get an appointment, an answer, or a residence card when you genuinely need one. AIMA has expanded its staff this year and moved more procedures online as it works through the enormous backlog it inherited when SEF, the old borders service, was shut down, so real improvement is plausible. But a single feel-good figure, presented without the detail the union is asking for, waiting times, unresolved cases, office capacity, card errors, is not the same as proof.

Bottom line: complaints are down, and that may reflect genuine progress, or people giving up on a system they cannot reach. Until AIMA publishes the harder numbers, the only reliable measure is your own experience of it.

⚡ QUICK HITS

Doctors in Barcelos are prescribing walks, swimming and time with dogs instead of pills. A health unit in the northern town has launched a 12-week pilot, AtivaMente, that "prescribes" pilates, swimming, mindfulness, water aerobics and animal-assisted therapy, with two trained dogs, Salvador and Lassie, to 25 to 30 people with depression and anxiety. The idea, in the unit's words, is that "health is not achieved only within healthcare facilities." What makes it notable is the direction of travel: Portugal is one of the heaviest per-person consumers of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication in the world, and this is a deliberate, doctor-led attempt to offer something other than a prescription pad for milder cases. It is a pilot, not a cure, and not a substitute for medication where that is genuinely needed. But it is a promising step, and a reminder that some of what helps most costs nothing. (If you are struggling yourself, it is worth raising with your own doctor rather than going it alone.)

Portugal's finance minister says the VAT cuts everyone is demanding would cost €2 billion and tip the country into deficit. With the opposition PS and Chega both pushing to cut VAT, value-added tax, on fuel from 23% to 13% and scrap it entirely on essential foods, Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento has put a price on it: around €1.2 billion a year for the fuel cut, €800 million for the food one, and a 2027 deficit as the result. "If they want to form a coalition and approve this," he said, "what they are telling the country is that they want there to be a deficit in 2027." It is the clearest reason yet for the government's refusal of the one measure protesters most want, and it lands with the 2027 state budget due in parliament by 10 October, so expect this fight to shape the next three weeks.

The US is reportedly weighing pulling nearly a third of its troops out of Europe. The Pentagon is reviewing options to withdraw a large share of the roughly 80,000 American troops stationed across the continent, part of a Trump administration push to make European nations shoulder more of their own defence. The reported cuts focus on the big bases in Germany, Italy and Spain, with a final recommendation not expected until November and no decision made yet. There is no Portugal-specific angle in the reporting so far, but a drawdown of this scale would reshape European security and shift more of the burden onto every NATO member, Portugal included, at a tense moment with Russia. For the American readers of this newsletter, it is a reminder that the transatlantic relationship long taken for granted is being actively renegotiated.

I quit my afternoon coffee. Not because I wanted to — because I found something better.

You know that wall you hit every day around 2–3 PM? I used to just accept it as the cost of doing anything. Another coffee, a quick spike, then the crash — and somehow I'd still feel dehydrated by dinner.

Then I tried X·E Fountain, Pique's brand-new electrolyte energy drink, and I genuinely wasn't ready for how good "no crash" could feel.

No caffeine jitters. No 4 PM slump. Just clean, steady energy that actually hydrates me instead of draining me. It's built with a premium Vitamin B Complex for natural cellular energy, Magnesium Malate + Taurate for real focus, and a full electrolyte blend that makes it feel like a treat, not a chore.

The cucumber-celery-lime flavor is so crisp and refreshing — it's basically stolen my afternoon coffee slot completely.

For launch, get 15% off for life

A quick note: today's ad comes from one of our network partners, Pique Life. Partnerships like this one are what keep The Lisbon Letter free to read every morning, and we thank them for it.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

LIBERTY (SANTOS)

Liberty is a café and a bookshop in one, which sounds like a gimmick until you spend a morning there and realise it is exactly what a slow start to the week should feel like. On Rua da Esperança in Santos, it does specialty coffee, ranked among the best in Europe, an all-day brunch menu, and low-intervention wines, with shelves of hand-picked books at the back in several languages for anyone who wants to linger over a second coffee.

The brunch is the draw, and it is a cut above the usual avocado-toast routine, running to things like eggs Benedict on brioche and a fluffy swirl omelette under a cloud of parmesan foam. It recently earned a Repsol Solete, the guide's mark for a genuinely good casual spot, and holds a near-perfect rating across thousands of reviews.

Expect to pay around €10 to €15, and expect the staff, who get named in reviews, to be part of why people come back. Pet-friendly, and there is a second branch out in Parede if you are ever that way. It is open every day, 8am to 4pm, walk-ins only, no reservations.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: this is a coffee-first place, so order the specialty filter rather than defaulting to a flat white, it is half the reason for the reputation. And since they do not take bookings and the room is small, get there before the mid-morning rush if you want a table.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

Reach Lisbon's English-speaking community, every morning. Advertise.