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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Portugal or I think any other southern Europe country is perfect for the 100k plus Dev nomad. Living like a king while running their own small business or working on remote projects. I did that for a couple of years. Absolutely enjoyed it. Food, people, weather, party. I do miss it sometimes. But man, some things are really f@€ed up there. Bureaucracy, badly organized government, healthcare and education. Sometimes dominant complain culture. Absolute shit quality of housing and public roads. Much larger difference in poor and rich. You ll get to notice these things after 1, 2 years while getting settled in. Then you realize to move.That's what I did.

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Compared to which country?

I agree with the bureaucracy and government inefficiency, but public roads and shit housing quality? Much larger difference between our and rich? Compared to what? Certainly not the US...

And for healthcare, the public health system has many problems but if you have the money/insurance you can use the private one, as you would in the US.

Biggest cons of Portugal are: poor economy (when compared to the leading Western countries; this results in low salaries, lack of strong international companies, external dependency, lack of autonomy, fragility to crisis) and a big state (causes high taxes, big companies dependency on the state, corruption, brain drain...). Still probably one of the best countries to retire to in the world.

Shit housing quality is absolutely true in my experience. For context, I'm Portuguese but I lived abroad for quite a few years and returned while doing the digital nomad thing, mostly because I have plenty of friends here and because I make what locally is considered a ridiculous amount of money. Anyway yeah. In order to get a house to a standard that I consider acceptable (and acceptable != good) I pretty much had to househunt at the very highest end of the market which didn't have much offer (this being in Porto). Granted, it's still stupid cheap compared to what I paid elsewhere but most houses in the country are flat-out appaling in quality and missing basic features or insulation.

edit: and public roads too, I often describe half of the city as being effectively goat tracks. I like nice cars, which means low profile tires, hardly a year goes by where I don't damage a wheel or blow a shock absorber, the amount of roads not made of tar is stupid.

I am also Portuguese, have lived in 3 other European countries (all of them economically richer) and am still living abroad. If I compare the housing quality of all these countries I disagree Portugal is worse. I can easily find much worse flats listed abroad than in Portugal. I remember seeing unimaginable things like 20 sq m studio with no bathroom (just a plastic separating the rooms) in central London for the rental price of a 1 bed in Porto.

Portuguese housing market, like potentially every other market, is smaller than the richer countries, but that doesn't mean house quality is "shit". I looked at idealista a few weeks ago and there are luxury houses being sold for 1M+ in the north (probably even more in the South), mostly obviously targeted to rich foreigners.

I didn't mention in my previous post: my standard comes from having lived in Oslo and Copenhagen, which admittedly is a high standard. But like I mentioned the high-end market is very small and you have few options for actually nice places. Also I added an edit mentioning roads: The amount of roads made of "paralelos" drives me up the wall (and poorly maintained tar roads outside the city).

I have lived in Stockholm too. I was paying a fortune for a 27sq meter studio in Vasastan. Again, comparatively housing in Portugal is not shit by any measure. You just need to pay for it.

Another Portuguese (dozens of us!) I think a lot of these comments are from people looking for 1 bedroom apartment rentals in Lisbon/Porto.

The reality is that most of the modern real estate in Portugal is bought not rented. We could go into the reasons mostly around Tenant protection laws and landlord taxation but there is little incentive to rent a brand new property.

In practice most of Lisbon and Porto's rental market is pre-1950's or houses from the 1980's construction boom (i.e. low quality construction) with no renovations done.

You can certainly find high-end 1 bedroom apartments but it is a small offering and mostly around financial centre areas.

Airbnb is also a factor, and has for sure removed hundreds of beautiful 1 bedroom flats in central areas from the rental market.

I'm not sure of the legal status of airBnB in Portugal, but it could be part of the problem.

My house supposedly has an A rating for thermal isolation, and yet I feel the indoor winter experience to be colder here than my experiences living in Illinois and Salzburg.

On the other hand, Portuguese winters are very humid, which makes it feels colder than it is.

> I agree with the bureaucracy and government inefficiency, but public roads and shit housing quality? Much larger difference between our and rich? Compared to what? Certainly not the US...

Compared to Northern Europe certainly. Housing quality in Portugal is a joke. It's like going back in time a 100 years compared to Northern Europe: no heat insulation, high fire risk due to old electric infrastructure, single-layer walls, illegal structural "fixes" that make multi story buildings weaker, massive cracks in staircase structures that just get painted over, single layer glass windows that don't shut properly, no central heating or any heating at all (unless you are OK with electricity bills for heating that are the price of your rent), pests, large amounts of 100+ year old ruins rotting away in the city center during a housing crisis, illegal settlements/ghetto's, and possibly worse of all: the rental prices are close to what they are in the North for a brand new perfect place there. That tells me that the rich in Portugal (real estate owners) are leeching off the middle class and can get away with anything including letting buildings rot for no reason at all on prime real estate locations.

To give another anecdotal reference: the average houses of the Colombian/Mexican/Philippine middle class are of WAY better quality than those of the Portuguese middle class.

> And for healthcare, the public health system has many problems but if you have the money/insurance you can use the private one, as you would in the US.

This is not accurate as far as I've experienced in 2020. In Portugal the private generalist doctors will often just refer you to the public health system (which is dysfunctional) for more advanced diagnosis and things like surgery.

My personal experience: I wanted to get a polysomnography done to check my sleep apnea status. Waiting time to see a generalist doctor in Lisbon: 4 months. Not kidding. I waited those 4 months. 1 day before the appointment I got a call that it was cancelled due to corona virus overload. I paid a private generalist doctor to get referred to what I needed, their answer: oh, I'm sorry we can't do that, you'll have to go through the public system. Most things in Portugal kind of don't seem to work at all in this way. This is what people mean by "terrible bureaucracy": it's just plain impossible to get things done. From VISA's to setting up a business and getting permits, everything seems utterly broken, corrupted and dysfunctional in a way that it isn't in most of the rest of Western Europe.

> Biggest cons of Portugal are: poor economy (when compared to the leading Western countries; this results in low salaries, lack of strong international companies, external dependency, lack of autonomy, fragility to crisis) and a big state (causes high taxes, big companies dependency on the state, corruption, brain drain...). Still probably one of the best countries to retire to in the world.

I agree that it's still a really fun country to live in, despite all the downsides, assuming you are financially geo-independent. I mean, I still live in Portugal after years.

If I had the intention of setting up a serious startup or have a job however, I would not chose Portugal. The thought of the bureaucracy alone makes me anxious. Aside from the bureaucracy, there's almost no capital for investments in startups. Furthermore: if you're thinking about disrupting a Portuguese industry, just forget about it: you're fighting cartels that are strongly coupled to the government.

It all strikes me as if sadly Portugal was never really able to shake off the legacy of their recent totalitarian/corrupt history.

> Compared to Northern Europe certainly. Housing quality in Portugal is a joke. It's like going back in time a 100 years compared to Northern Europe: no heat insulation, high fire risk due to old electric infrastructure, single-layer walls, large amounts of 100+ year old ruins rotting away in the city center during a housing crisis,

Hello from the UK, we definitely have the exact same issues in all UK cities, London included.

I am Portuguese and currently live in the UK, and have lived in the Netherlands and Sweden too. My brother has lived in Belgium. Housing in Portugal compared to any of these -> not shit.

I am sorry you have such a bad experience in Portugal regarding housing but it is not reflective of reality.

The only thing that is clearly worse as I mentioned is the insulation, but as I mentioned in other comments that is in part consequence of the weather and countries in northern Europe have the opposite problem in the summer.

Don't confuse your inability to pay for good housing with the entire country having shit housing.

I agree the public health system sucks compared to all the other countries I have been to. Good private sector clinics work much better though. I can also give a personal example, a few years ago I had an ACL tear and waited 3 months to even have an MRI in the public system, I gave up and got it done in a few days in a private clinic, got an appointment with a top orthopaedic surgeon in a week and a proposal to do an ACL reconstruction the next week.

I agree on the bureaucracy/corruption part and that it is not a country to earn money, it is a country to spend it (there is a reason why I and so many other Portuguese work abroad).

What was the cost of the private consultation and surgery?

I don't know all the prices by heart but it was something like: MRI 250 EUR Specialist consultation with orthopedic surgeon 100 EUR (this is with a top European surgeon, former president of ESSKA). Surgery 8k EUR

The prices are without health insurance. Otherwise you obviously pay much less.

> (unless you are OK with electricity bills for heating that are the price of your rent)

I once read that Portugal has the most expensive electricity in all Europe. My house has AC in almost every room and yet I shudder to use them!

> Compared to Northern Europe certainly. Housing quality in Portugal is a joke. It's like going back in time a 100 years compared to Northern Europe: (...)

Portuguese here, and a civil engineer to boot.

From your description, it sounds like the reason you found the houses you're commenting on to be reminiscent of going back in time 100 years is most likely because they were indeed over 100 years old, and/or illegal settlements that haven't received a inhabitability certificate ("certificado de habitação" for the portguese speakers among us).

The reference to the "illegal ghettos" sounds an awful lot like one of the still existing offshoots of the africa exodus, post-carnation revolution shanty towns that popped up during the 1970s during the massive influx of people from the newly independent former colonies. There are a few of those still standing, such as Lisbon's infamous Cova da Moura neighborhood, but a bunch of social housing neighborhoods were built to re-house similar shanty towns in the outskirts of Lisbon's and Porto's great metropolitan area since then, which are comprised of quick and cheap housing projects. Even though those houses are exceptionally cheap (you could purchase a 2-bedroom appartment in thr Quinta da Princesa neighborhood for around 20k€) they are also renowned for being extremely shoddy houses in extremely shoddy neighborhoods.

Roads I've driven on in Portugal were all much clearer of traffic, less potholed and better signposted than the UK.

In particular they have some motorway innovations we should steal: A minimum speed limit, and a zone around junctions where overtaking is prohibited.

Also, who needs to drive anyway day-to-day when you live in a dense, walkable city with public transport?

The highways are generally good indeed (I understand because most are relatively new; constructed after joining the EU).

Roads inside cities and villages are bad. Rough, broken or badly patched asphalt everywhere. No problem for driving cars and Portugues culture values having a car highly. But the road quality make biking and skating APITA.

Yeah, I find it hilarious that my biggest culture shock with Europe is how unionized industries can strike and actually cause a noticeable inconvenience.

I'm always like "WHAT!? How is this possible? Why didn't the bus/train/airline just declare bankruptcy, ending the jobs of 20,000 people at once, and do an IPO without unionized workers a year later!?"

and then I have to laugh it off because thats just so American of me. our unions just have people walking in a circle for up to a few months, in one city against a multinational corporation, and barely anything occurs except some inspiration for your new moon drum circle.

Because when you cut hundreds or thousands of jobs, it will have a devastating impact in the community, not only for those directly affected, but also for those that will compete with them for available jobs. I find it hilarious that an american doesn't find it obvious, given the abundance of american examples on this.

America is a much larger more cohesive market, which means specific communities have no affect on the national company which has expanded to other countries as well.

The individual nations in Europe are the size of individual American states, and can only be compared when talking about the European Single Market as a whole, which is new and filled with the vestiges of national companies that are just getting around to expanding into their neighboring countries.

The American experience has been removed from communities for a very long time that corporate apathy is the expected experience.

Could you share an example case of that IPO scenerio you mention?

A union overplayed their hand with Hostess over wage stuff not knowing Hostess’ financial prospects and the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the worker strike. The company assets and factories were sold off and the buyers kept the brand name and IPO’d and it trades under TWNK. No union workers lol.

If the bus company did what you suggest a lot of European people would boycott the new one.

You can boycott it as long as you don't need to get to the next town over. When you do, and every other company has done the same shit in the past, you become inured to it.

At least this would not be possible. If you declare bancruptcy the company will be put under a outside CEO who tries to save the company. Is it different in the US?

Depends on the circumstance

I can vouch on the "complain culture"!

I even have a neat anecdote:

A Portuguese lady was complaining that the supermarket cashier line took too long (this was pre-covid). So I told her that there were self-checkouts the isle over. Her answer was: "I don't like self-checkout either; I like to do things the way I'm used to".

Or don't conflate my complaints with a desire for solutions.

Bureaucracy sucks, the usual way is to hire someone who knows how to deal with it (Accountants/Lawyers for company registration etc). And once you're done, you're usually done.

"Ah but in the US is not so complicated" yes but some other things make up for it (and some other things are more complicated in the US - but we usually see the downsides first)

> Sometimes dominant complain culture. Absolute shit quality of housing and public roads

Yes, agree. Insulation is getting better, though of course it's Portugal, it's not getting as cold as a more northern city.

> though of course it's Portugal, it's not getting as cold as a more northern city.

The winter temperature inside an average Portuguese house is definitely way cooler than that in any house in any country North of Portugal.

The inside of living spaces in Northern Europe houses hardly ever go under 19 degrees C (usually a few degrees warmer I would guess). Even if it's like -30 C outside.

In Portugal it can easily be 5 - 15 C for weeks/months on end inside a house. There's really no comparison in comfort to be honest. I say this as someone who has lived in both Northern Europe and Portugal for multiple years.

Oh I understand. In a similar way, the hotter places have air-conditioning (granted, not so popular but not uncommon) so the northerner cities suffer in heat waves.

And yes you definitely feel it comfort wise

Health care? In Spain at least healthcare is awesome. Similarly the roads are excellent. Bureaucracy on the other hand...

Different countries.

Can you elaborate on healthcare. What don't you like about it?

See the bit after the second quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26272690

This happened during covid though. Is it always like that?

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