How We Found the Real Portugal

And the Mistakes We Made Along the Way

When last we left El Jefe and his Field Notes tales, he and his wife had made a mistake.

It wasn’t an obvious mistake at first. But mistake it was, nonetheless.

And in that mistake is a great lesson learned when relocating abroad: Always spend time touring the place you think you want to live before you move, or at the very least rent an Airbnb or some other short-term rental solution before planting your roots.

You’ll save yourself a lot of frustration and money.

Our mistake begins about 30 minutes west of Lisbon, Portugal, in a lovely and beachy little hamlet known as Cascais.

While still living in Prague, my wife Yulia and I had flown to Portugal on vacation and spent time in Lisbon and in the Algarve, down along the country’s southern shoreline. We’d never seen Cascais. But she read in all the online forums frequented by Ukrainians and Russians (she grew up in Crimea, attended university in Ukraine, and taught college-level history in Moscow) she kept seeing an abundance of positive comments about Cascais, and that there was a decent-sized Ukrainian community in the area.

She figured she and her son would feel more comfortable in a place where native Russian speakers abounded.

So, Cascais or bust.

And spoiler alert… it was a bust.

Because of visa timing issues, we were moving at the tail-end of summer. All the private schools our kid might have attended we filled. His only option: a public school—and he understood precisely zero Portuguese at the time.

Similarly, all the best—read: affordable—apartments in the core of Cascais proper where

already locked into long-term leases. The two or three that were still available decided (once they found out we were foreigners) that we would need to prepay an entire year’s worth of rent and put down a deposit of six months.

Ain’t no one got time for that malarkey.

The only option we could find on short-notice was a truly lovely, but fairly tight three-bedroom, two-bath apartment of about 900 square feet.

The owner had just finished remodeling it, turning a stale and dated 1970s flat into an uber-modern and lovely apartment with tons of light and high ceilings.

But there was a problem…

We weren’t in Cascais proper but a community bordering Cascais that had a very different vibe—more urban, more crowded, and less polished than what we were aiming for. It just didn’t click. The energy wasn’t right, the environment didn’t suit our day-to-day life, and after a year, we realized it just wasn’t where we wanted to be.

So, we moved to Lisbon… and traded one set of problems for another.

Lisbon, I will note, is a lovely city. But you have to accept that traffic will impact your life. Or, you have to accept that to avoid traffic you’ll need to live closer to the city center, where rents will rise to levels not far removed from US rental prices… or that the apartments you can afford in Lisbon are well below the standards you’re likely accustomed to in America.

And here’s where I’ll hit pause to say this: If we’d been RETA members at the time and paying closer attention to Ronan McMahon’s scouting reports, we would’ve known better. Ronan was already flagging other parts of Portugal that checked all the boxes—value, quality of life, community, access to beaches or culture—but that weren’t overrun by tourists or international hype. We just didn’t take the time to dig into that research like we should have.

Today, Yulia and I live in Braga, up in northern Portugal, about 30 minutes north of Porto and an hour south of Spain.

This is home. It feels like home.

We’re up on a hill overlooking mountains dressed in pine and eucalyptus forests. Traffic is rarely bothersome. The air is crisper and fresher. We’re never awakened at 2 a.m. by drunken revelers and idiots who think that reviving a motorcycle’s engine is funny when the world’s fast asleep.

As I told Yulia one day, “If we’d only spent time looking for what we really wanted in a Portuguese city, we’d have landed here first and saved ourselves a ton of money.” To be clear, that ton is probably in the range of $10,000 when accounting for moving costs and whatnot.

But… we’re exceedingly happy now. We’ve found the real Portugal.

Yes, mistakes were made. But we corrected them along the way. And now we’re living the Portuguese life we were seeking for more than two years.