Philosophical question. If I tell you that a post headline is clickbait, have I effectively de-baited it. Whether I have or no, this week’s post title is unabashedly clickbait. I’m here to talk about life in rural Portugal. Gotcha!

I was reading the Penamacor municipality’s glossy twice-yearly magazine the other day (that Google Lens is pretty good at translating while standing on one leg!) and my eye was caught by an article describing a public meeting in Penamacor, presenting a report commissioned by the inter-municipality of Beira Baixa.

Since Beira Baixa is not a name I have dropped in these pages much, if at all, over the last five years, let me bore you with a brief description of Portugal’s political structure.

All of Portugal is divided into some twenty provinces (seventeen more than Gaul). Penamacor is in the fourth largest province (in terms of area): Castelo Branco (which is also the name of the province’s capital city). Each province is divided into municipalities. The village of Penamacor, with a population of about 6000, is the largest parish in, and the ‘capital’ of, the municipality of Penamacor, which is itself part of the inter-municipality, or district, of Beira Baixa, a looser association formed to formulate and carry out policy common to several municipalities (in Penamacor’s case, 8) within a single district.

Castelo Branco is Portugal’s fourth largest province in terms of area, covering almost 7% of Portugal’s total land mass. However, its population of 226,000 represents only about 2% of the country’s population. This reflects the imbalance in the distribution of Portugal’s population. The metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto together constitute only 5% of its total land area, but they contain almost 45% of the country’s population.

This uneven distribution is largely a result of the economic boom that began in the 1960s and led to mass migration from the hinterland, especially the rural North (where Penamacor is situated) to the urban centres. This was coupled with a drop in the birth rate to well below natural replacement levels,

So, back to the report commissioned by Beira Baixa. The authority commissioned the Castelo Branco Polytechnic to conduct an analysis of population change in the district. Specifically, the report focussed on the immigration situation and dynamics in Beira Baixa from 2008 to 2023.

The report revealed that recent migration has played a fundamental role in reshaping Beira Baixa’s population dynamics, reflecting growth trends that contrast with the region’s historical recession. The total population of Beira Baixa is just over 80,000, having dropped by about 10,000 in the decade before 2010. However, the number of legalized foreigners living in the inter-municipality was 1,856 in 2008. By 2023, it had grown to 6,786, a 265% increase. In Penamacor itself, over the same period, the number grew from 58 to 440, a 758% increase. Since Ollie is a Portuguese citizen, our family has contributed only 3 to this figure.

If the kids’ subjective perception is a guide, this number has increased considerably in the two years since the survey was completed. Even on our visits, when I venture no further afield than the supermarket and the dog walk to the forest, I almost always come across at least one or two new faces during every trip.

Due to this growth, the real population in the territory of Penamacor, in 2023, increased by 49 inhabitants, resulting from a positive migratory balance of 130 inhabitants, as opposed to a negative natural balance of 81 inhabitants. This growth and population inversion is happening for the first time in the last 50 years and enhances the development strategy of the municipality, reinforcing the growth of the school community in the last three years.

The report also indicates that the United Kingdom and Germany are the countries that supply the most new residents to the municipality, although other North European countries are also well represented.

During the preparation of this analysis, about 400 surveys were carried out with immigrants residing in the territory, which showed that, despite the structural challenges, Beira Baixa has been attractive to immigrants and has the potential to deepen this path of animating development at local and regional level. Researchers also carried out interviews and focus group sessions with a very large number of local interviewees, from a variety of institutional and business spheres, and the general perception of immigrants was positive in most municipalities, highlighting their contribution to the local economy and to the maintenance of essential services.

The authors also highlight that, from the community’s perspective, this immigration represents an opportunity to revitalize the economy and combat depopulation, but it requires effective inclusion strategies, with the most pressing challenges including housing, language barriers, and access to public services.

From our limited perspective, it seems to me that Tslil and Micha’el and the boys are integrating successfully in the local community, meeting all of the above challenges successfully. I suspect, looking at their circle of immigrant friends, that their integration is well above average for the immigrant community. They certainly deserve for it to be, because it is something whose importance they have long been aware of, and they have invested considerable time and effort in ensuring their successful absorption in the local community.

Which is just as well, because Micha’el’s parents have made hardly any effort. We can still barely scrape together two words of Portuguese, and our interactions with the village include a lot of Bom diases or Boa tardes (depending on the time of day), a fair number of Obrigados and Desculpas, and an inordinate amount of smiling and nodding, but precious little more than that. Almost everyone we meet knows who we are; half the time, Lua, or the boys, are our calling card. We, on the other hand, know very few locals, beyond shopkeepers and the kids’ immediate neighbours. Fortunately, being the kids’ parents wins us a fair degree of affection and regard with no effort required on our part.