William C. Says:
My wife and I, both in our 60s and retired, are going to try to get residency and then citizenship in Portugal. Is it true we will have to spend six months out of the year there to do so? Do we have to leave and come back?
Global Diversification Expert Ted Baumann Says:
Hi William,
You first need to consider the residence permit you will have in Portugal.
Temporary residence permits of the kind that require you to leave the country to reapply—specifically the Schengen visa that applies to the entire EU—don’t count towards naturalization.
To qualify for Portuguese citizenship, you need to have some form of long-term residency first. That could be a retirement visa, an investment visa, or some other kind.
Those long-term visas allow you to live in the country as long as you like, and to come and go as you please. But if your goal is to acquire citizenship, you need to spend a specific amount of time in the country every year to qualify for naturalization—the longer the better.
One of the oddities of life in the EU is that you typically cross national borders without telling anyone. Once you’ve got a long-term Portuguese residency visa, you can drive across the border into Spain and go anywhere within the EU without the Portuguese government knowing about it.
Many people have asked whether doing so for more than six months out of the year would cause trouble with the Portuguese government, but I honestly don’t know how they would find out unless they did some digging.
To be on the safe side, I would plan on being scrupulous about remaining in Portugal for no less than six months out of the year, or whatever period their immigration authorities tell you.
If you are retired, then the best for you would be the D7 independent means visa. That allows you to live in the country indefinitely as long as you can demonstrate a foreign passive income of a little over €3,000 a month. That will qualify towards naturalization in five years.
Read more about visas and residency in Portugal on the IL website’s dedicated resource page.
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