Good morning, Lisbon. It's Thursday, April 9, and we're looking at 21°C with sunshine. Rosalia plays her second night at MEO Arena tonight, the EES deadline is tomorrow, and Knight Frank has just confirmed what plenty of people living here already suspected. Let's get into it.
🌬️ AIR QUALITY: 21 (Good). Another blue-sky morning.
🗞️ TOP STORY
LISBON IS NOW THE RICHEST ADDRESS IN EUROPE.
Knight Frank has released its 2025 Relocation Survey, and Lisbon has come out on top for millionaire relocation in Europe. The city scored 7.27 out of 10 across lifestyle quality, affordability relative to peer cities, and personal safety. London came second at 7.13. Madrid third at 6.76. Dublin and Barcelona rounded out the top five. Geneva, Monaco, and the other usual suspects didn't make it.
Yes, you read that right. Lisbon beat London on "affordability relative to peer cities." Which tells you quite a lot about what's happened to London, and a bit about what's coming for Lisbon.
The context helps. The UK is on track to lose a record 16,500 millionaires in 2025, the biggest single-year exodus any country has ever recorded. The industry nickname is "Wexit." It's been driven by the end of the non-dom regime, sharp rises in capital gains and inheritance tax, and a set of new rules targeting family wealth structures that finally pushed a lot of people to stop talking about leaving and actually leave. A meaningful chunk of them are landing here. Portugal is expected to gain around 1,400 new millionaire residents this year, and Lisbon is getting most of them.
According to Henley & Partners, Portugal was already home to around 62,700 millionaires and 108 centi-millionaires (people with at least $100 million in investable wealth) by the end of 2023, the most recent count. Thirty-seven of those centi-millionaires lived in Lisbon itself, and another 45 in the Algarve, a number that apparently swells further during peak season (as if anyone with a yacht needs a holiday from the Algarve). Those are the people buying in Principe Real, Estrela, Lapa, and along the coast from Cascais to Comporta. The numbers have only grown since.
Why here? The Portuguese passport ranks fifth most powerful in the world. The international schools are good and the private healthcare is good. Portugal sits in the top five globally on the Global Peace Index. The weather is kind, the flights to anywhere else in Europe are short, and the language is learnable if you really try. For a British family looking at £200,000 a year in school fees and a new inheritance tax regime, moving to Cascais stops being a lifestyle choice and starts looking like basic arithmetic.
Here's the bit that matters for anyone reading this who isn't shopping for a second home in Comporta. When Knight Frank calls Lisbon "affordable relative to peer cities," they mean compared to London and Geneva. They don't mean compared to a Portuguese teacher's salary, or a remote worker earning dollars, or anyone who moved here in 2022 thinking they'd found the last great deal in Europe. Those two definitions of "affordable" are pulling further apart every month, and you can see it in the rent, the restaurant bills, and the queue at your padaria on a Saturday morning. The city's best qualities, the slow lunches and the warmth and the lack of London-ness, are being bought wholesale by people who can pay for them at any price.
Bottom line: Lisbon has just won a competition it's not entirely clear it wanted to enter. More millionaires are on the way. The question is what happens to everyone who was already here.
⚡ QUICK HITS
EES deadline tomorrow. Friday, April 10, is the hard deadline for full biometric border implementation at every Schengen entry point. If you hold a non-EU passport and you're flying tomorrow, get to Humberto Delgado at least two hours early. Nothing about the airport's infrastructure has improved since last winter's seven-hour queues, and hoping for the best is not a strategy.
Montenegro's €600 million credit line lands with a thud. The Prime Minister announced a €600 million credit line on April 2 to help Portuguese companies absorb the energy cost shock from the Middle East crisis. The scheme, Portugal Energy Resilience, targets firms where energy accounts for more than 20% of production costs, run through the state-owned Banco Português de Fomento. Within 24 hours, Jorge Pisco of the SME Confederation dismissed the whole thing as "pomp and circumstance," pointing out that a credit line is debt, and nobody running a small business wants to take on more debt at current interest rates. The government called it resilience. Most of the people it's aimed at are calling it a headline.
Nearly four in ten Portuguese will experience anxiety symptoms this year. New data from INE released on April 6 for World Health Day found that 39.4% of the Portuguese population aged 16 and over will experience generalised anxiety symptoms in 2026. That's up 7.4 percentage points from the last survey. Women (46.2%) report significantly higher rates than men (31.2%), and the elderly, those with lower levels of education, and chronic disease sufferers are most affected. Not a small number, and worth sitting with as Lisbon tries to sell itself as the good-mood capital of Europe.
Lula visits Portugal April 21. Brazil's President has confirmed a visit to Portugal on April 21. No agenda has been published yet, but Portugal-Brazil relations have been under strain over the new Nationality Law, which removes the special citizenship track for CPLP nationals after five years. Expect that to come up.
Drug prices expected to rise in Portugal. Portugal Resident reported on April 7 that pharmaceutical prices in Portugal will have to rise "sooner or later," driven by inflation and political pressure to bring them closer to the European average. No confirmed timeline, but worth watching if you rely on the SNS or have regular prescriptions.
🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY
Since today's top story is about people with a lot of money moving to Lisbon, it feels appropriate to recommend a restaurant where you can eat like them without actually being them.
Zunzum Gastrobar is Chef Marlene Vieira's more accessible restaurant, sitting next door to her Michelin-starred tasting menu spot, Marlene, in the bright glass-fronted building at the Lisbon Cruise Terminal. Chef Marlene is the first Portuguese woman to hold a Michelin star, and Zunzum is essentially the same kitchen philosophy in a gastrobar format: Portuguese ingredients, modern technique, dishes built for sharing, and a price tag that doesn't require a Golden Visa.
The menu is full of reasons to come back. Algarve pink prawns with seaweed and lemon butter. Alentejo pork chop with fried polenta and roasted pepper ketchup. A grilled octopus that has its own small fan base. Cozido gyozas, where the classic Portuguese stew gets turned into a dumpling, which sounds gimmicky until you eat one. The wine list is good and not ruinously priced. The cocktails are worth showing up early for.
The room itself is bright, airy, and modern, with a riverside terrace that's one of the best lunch spots in the city when the sun is out. Zunzum holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, which is the guide's way of saying "very good food, sensibly priced." Mains sit in the mid-€20s, and you can eat very well for around €30-40 a head.
Avenida Infante D. Henrique, Doca do Jardim do Tabaco, Lisbon Cruise Terminal. Monday to Saturday 12pm-11pm (Thursday-Saturday until midnight), Sunday lunch only, 12pm-5pm. Book ahead, especially if you want the terrace.
Insider tip: Lunch on the terrace on a sunny weekday, with the octopus and a glass of white wine is pretty nice.
📅 WHAT'S ON
Rosalia, night two (Tonight, Thu April 9) MEO Arena, 8:30pm.
EES Deadline (Tomorrow, Fri April 10) Biometric border system goes fully mandatory.
Italian Film Festival (April 10-18) Opens Friday with the new Sorrentino film. Closing gala at the Coliseu April 18.
Tinariwen (Tue April 14) LAV Lisboa Ao Vivo. Desert blues from the Sahara.
Liberty Day (Sat April 25) Next public holiday. Carnation Revolution celebrations.
📜 ON THIS DAY
April 9, 1939. On Easter Sunday, contralto Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and sang for 75,000 people, with millions more listening on the radio. She was only there because the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall because she was Black. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest, and the Lincoln Memorial concert was arranged in response. Anderson opened with "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," and changed the second line from "of thee I sing" to "to thee we sing." She didn't say anything about the snub. She didn't need to.
See you tomorrow morning.
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