We finally have our Portuguese visas!

I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been about getting our Portuguese long-stay visas until we finally had them in hand – or in passport, to be precise. With the uncertainty gone, relief flooded through me.

The tension had been building for five months, ever since we began the formal visa application process last May. A woman who worked in Ottawa’s Embassy of Portugal had told us several times that allowing two months to receive our visas was an entirely reasonable time estimate. And we believed her. Rookie mistake. We had read about Portuguese bureaucracy then, and thought we knew about it when I wrote initially about us moving to Portugal, but in retrospect, we were still wet behind the ears.

In the interests of helping others who may want to do what we’re doing, here’s the visa process we experienced as Canadians (the process differs in other countries):

• May 5: Uploaded our documents to the embassy’s E-Visa website. We thought the two-month waiting period started then, and had bought travel health insurance and booked our flights to Portugal for July3 (both are required for the application). But we were wrong about the timeline. There is very little information available for this process and no one answered our calls or emails.
• June 1: Our Portuguese apartment lease started. Too bad, so sad – we weren’t there to enjoy it.
• June 21: In-person appointment at the Embassy of Portugal to review our documents and pay the application fee. This is when the estimated two-month waiting period really started. The woman told us we could expect our visas in two months – maybe three, but she didn’t really think it would take three months. Again, we believed her.
• July 3-4: Flew to Portugal anyhow, entering on a 90-day tourist visa. While we had a wonderful summer setting up our apartment in Alcobaça and exploring Portugal, that worry about our visas haunted me. I spent more than a few sleepless nights, tossing and turning and worrying about what we’d do if the visas didn’t come through.

• Aug. 21: No visa at the two-month mark. No response to several emails asking for an update.
• Sept. 21: No visa at the three-month mark. No response.
• Sept. 22: Flew home to Canada because we’d been in Portugal for nearly 90 days. (If you overstay the 90-day tourist visa, you can be fined or even banned from re-entering for several years.) Our flights back to Portugal were booked for Oct. 5, but would we get our long-stay visas by then? We’d have to stay in Canada until we got them.
• Sept. 26: We showed up unannounced at the Embassy of Portugal to ask where our visas were in the process. The man agreed it had been taking too long and said he’d send an email to the visa section in Lisbon and call us in two days with an update.
• Sept. 28: No call. We began making plans to stay in Canada for at least a month, waiting. I agreed to bring pumpkin pies to Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s.

• Sept. 29: Got the call! Our visas were ready! We quickly realized we had to get to the embassy right away, within 30 minutes, to get the visas inserted into our passports before the embassy closed. The next day was a holiday, then the weekend, then we’d be in Toronto, leaving just the morning of Oct. 5 – the day we were to leave – as the only other day to get them inserted. So, we jumped in the car and raced to the embassy, thankfully hitting just one red light and no cops on the freeway. We arrived with 10 minutes to spare. The embassy man said it would take just 10 minutes. I paced the waiting room, listening to him have a good ol’ chat with a colleague in the back room. Thirty minutes later, he emerged with our passports, visas inserted. Hallelujah!
• Oct 5-6: Flew back to Portugal. At the border control desk, I proudly pointed out our D7 visas to the agent. “We’re moving to Portugal!” I announced. He smiled, asked where, and gave a approving nod when I said “Alcobaça.” Then he stamped our passports.

Our first visitors! My sister Cynthia and her partner, Jim, came in September. We explored Porto and the Douro Valley, where we picked and stomped grapes destined to become Port and wine.

Through our summer in Portugal, we learned a key cultural characteristic: Portuguese people tend not to respond by email or phone, even when they’ve promised to do so, if they don’t have an answer. For example, in North America, if you send an email asking for an update, you usually get a reply right away, even if it’s “Sorry, I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” Not so here. If the person doesn’t have an answer, you won’t get a response until they do. This characteristic explains why we didn’t get any answers to our emails requesting visa updates. The same thing happened to us at the bank when our Portuguese credit cards were delayed and with stores when our appliances didn’t arrive on time.

“One of the best cultural shifts that happens when you settle into Portugal is to learn to shrug, smile, and remember that it IS Portugal,” said our upstairs neighbour, Maxine. And she’s right. It’s the only way to stay calm and sane here.

Despite worrying about our visas, we spent a wonderful summer exploring the sights in Portugal, including Roman ruins at Conimbriga, the Gotheborg ship, Lisbon’s National Tile Museum and the Sāo Bernardo festival in Alcobaça, plus listening to fado music in Coimbra and relaxing at home.

I’ll need to hone my patience because the process of moving to Portugal is not yet complete. The next step is getting our Resident´s card at an appointment with Portugal’s immigration and borders service, the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF). Normally, this SEF appointment is three or four months after you receive your visa. But for us, it’s on May 8, 2023 – 7.5 months later. The sticky point is that, until your SEF appointment, you’re allowed only two entries into Portugal and one of those is your initial entry (Oct. 6, for us). So that will trim our travelling wings until next spring. However, there’s still a lot of Portugal to explore.

We got back to Alcobaça in time to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with some of our new American expat friends. We had to improvise since we couldn’t get a whole turkey or sage or cranberry sauce or canned pumpkin. (Someone told us we might be able to order a whole turkey at the market. We’ll check that out for Christmas.)

But, with our developing skills of flexibility, patience and shrugging, we put together a delicious dinner anyhow. Along with our friends, we gave thanks that we’re in Portugal, able to enjoy this marvellous country.

We got our Portuguese visas in Ottawa on Sept. 29, 2022. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.