Orders to leave Portugal jumped more than 50-fold in a year

The number of foreigners told to leave Portugal has exploded, and the head of the agency behind it is on his way out. It's Thursday, 24 September. Thirty-one degrees. Air quality: 56 (Moderate). Here's what you need to know.

🗞️ ORDERS TO LEAVE PORTUGAL JUMPED FROM 446 TO 23,000 IN A YEAR

Yesterday we looked at the record 1.6 million foreigners now living in Portugal. Today, the sharper edge of the same AIMA report: the number of people formally ordered to leave the country soared to 23,133 in 2025, up from just 446 the year before. That is not a typo. It is more than a fifty-fold increase, and it marks a hard break from years of Portugal issuing among the fewest removal orders in the entire EU.

A removal notification is an official order, from AIMA or the police, telling a foreign national who is in the country irregularly to leave within a set period, usually twenty days. AIMA frames the jump as the result of clearing a vast backlog and "strengthening administrative and police enforcement capacity", in other words, catching up on cases that had piled up, many dating to the pandemic, rather than a sudden new wave of raids. The nationalities receiving the most orders were, in order, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Nigerian, Algerian, Moroccan and Nepali citizens.

Two things are worth understanding clearly, because the headline sounds more dramatic than the reality. First, an order to leave is not the same as being removed. Portugal does not have the detention and enforcement infrastructure to physically deport people at anything like this scale, so the overwhelming majority of these notifications do not end in a forced expulsion. Second, this surge is tangled up with politics: much of it was issued around the May 2025 snap election, when immigration was a central campaign issue, and it reflects a deliberate government pivot away from the open-door years.

So where is this heading? The direction of travel is stricter. The government has legislated for longer administrative detention of irregular migrants, in line with a wider European push to make detention the default across the bloc. But analysts caution that the ambition is running ahead of the machinery: Portugal is issuing orders faster than it can act on them, and advocacy groups warn the real effect is fear in the migrant population, and workers left more exposed to exploitation by employers who know they have no formal grace period.

Adding to the uncertainty, the man who has run AIMA through all of this is leaving. Pedro Portugal Gaspar, its president since July 2024, is moving to the Competition Authority, and no successor has been named. The migration technicians' union, already in dispute with the government over pay, has warned that the agency needs stability, not another change at the top just as it faces its biggest test.

Bottom line: orders to leave have surged, but the system to enforce them has not caught up, and it is landing on people who in many cases work and pay taxes here. If you or someone you know receives a notification, this is precisely the moment to get proper legal advice rather than panic, an order to leave is the start of a process with appeal rights, not the end of one.

⚡ QUICK HITS

The PM told Wall Street that Portugal is a safe bet. Speaking at the New York Stock Exchange, where he became the first Portuguese head of government invited to ring the closing bell, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro pitched the country to American investors: a fourth straight year of budget surplus (albeit a small one), growth above the eurozone average, inflation under control, and 75% of electricity from renewables. He also noted that the number of Americans living in Portugal has risen 30% since 2023, to around 21,000. It was an unabashed sales pitch that glossed over the fuel-price discontent back home, but the underlying numbers, surplus, above-average growth, recent credit upgrades, are real.

A petition wants Lisbon to hold a referendum on electric scooters. The Portuguese Automobile Club (ACP) has collected around 20,000 signatures calling for a citywide vote on whether to keep Lisbon's shared e-scooter scheme, and will now formally submit it to the Municipal Assembly. There are roughly 6,000 shared scooters on the city's streets, and complaints, about pavements, safety and clutter, have run since the scheme launched in 2019. It is a long road to an actual referendum (the Assembly and then the Constitutional Court both have to sign off), but if it happens, Lisboetas could get a direct say. Love them or loathe them, the scooters may be on the ballot.

Ronaldo plays in Lisbon tonight, chasing his 1,000th goal. Cristiano Ronaldo, who had hinted he might retire from international football after this summer's World Cup, has decided to keep going, and wins his 234th Portugal cap against Wales tonight at the José Alvalade Stadium, home of his boyhood club Sporting. The 41-year-old is on 979 career goals for club and country, and says reaching 1,000 in a Portugal shirt would be "a beautiful story." Whatever your view of him, a Ronaldo goal chase in his old home ground is the kind of thing that empties the streets and fills the bars.

Health Connection — Discover What Your Spine May Be Telling You

There is a word going round for what years of laptop work do to your posture: shrimping. The slow curl forward until you are hunched over the screen like, well, a shrimp. If that sounds familiar, and if you are reading this on a laptop right now, go on, check, your spine has probably been trying to tell you something for a while.

Health Connection, a chiropractic clinic in Miraflores, has spent over twenty years helping people of all ages understand and look after their spine, posture and mobility. What sets them apart is the approach. Rather than a rushed, one-size-fits-all adjustment, their qualified chiropractors build care around each person's specific concerns, history and health goals, in a setting designed so that every patient feels heard, supported and fully informed about what is happening in their own body. Whether it is a nagging lower back, a stiff neck, restricted movement or a longer-standing issue, the aim is to help you understand the cause rather than just chase the symptom.

They are offering Lisbon Letter readers an exclusive complimentary spine screening, no cost and no obligation to begin treatment, available by appointment from 1 to 15 October. In a 10 to 15-minute appointment, a chiropractor assesses the three areas of your spine where you feel the most discomfort and uses MyoVision technology to map and visually show you the patterns of muscular tension along your back, then talks you through what the findings actually mean. You walk away with a clear, professional read on what is going on.

There is no obligation to go any further. But if you do decide to take the next step, every Lisbon Letter subscriber gets an exclusive discount on a full chiropractic assessment at Health Connection.

Book by appointment and subject to availability, so if you have been meaning to get something looked at, it is worth doing sooner rather than later. To request your screening, email [email protected] with "Lisbon Letter" in the subject line.

→ Find out more at Health Connection

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is useful to you, or if you know someone whose posture has seen better days, every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

🍽️ SPOT OF THE DAY

LUCDUC GELATERIA (CAMPOLIDE)

In a city with a gelateria on every corner, LucDuc is the one Italians point you to. It is a small, artisanal ice cream shop in Campolide, opened in 2017 by Luciano and Duc, two friends from Vicenza in northern Italy, who make everything fresh on-site each day, you can watch them do it, using proper Italian technique and Portuguese milk and fruit.

The result is gelato that reviewers do not hedge about: many simply call it the best in Lisbon, and a few go further and say the best they have ever had. The flavours are intense and clean rather than sugary, there are sorbets and vegan options alongside the classics, and the two owners run the place with the kind of easy warmth that could turn a one-off treat into a regular habit. It is a little off the tourist trail up in Campolide, which is exactly why it stays this good.

It is a gelateria, so hours are generous through the afternoon and evening, but they can shift, so check before a special trip. And yes, it is nearly October and we are still recommending ice cream. In this heat, who are we to argue.

→ Find them here ←

Insider tip: if you get two scoops and one is a fruit sorbet and the other something rich like chocolate or pistachio, eat the sorbet first. It is the lighter, brighter flavour, and if you start with the chocolate it will flatten the fruit before you get to it. Same logic as tasting the whites before the reds.

📅 WHAT'S ON

See you tomorrow morning.

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