Brits fleeing the UK ahead of Brexit have started breathing new life into Portugal’s desertified heartlands: areas where experts in demographics have been warning for years that the sight of children could soon become a rarity.
Not so in Penamacor, the borough which in the 2011 Census saw old people outnumber the young by over five to one.
Today, just seven years later, it’s all changing – and it’s thanks to Brexit impelling Brits of all persuasions to find a place in Europe to hang their hats before the proverbial drawbridge goes up.
Diário de Notícias has visited the area and heard from its mayor that he is even considering putting up bilingual road signs to help new arrivals.
The phenomenon began two years ago, António Luís Beites told reporters.
“But in 2018 new people have started arriving very day. Of these 60% are British and the majority of the rest have a link the Britain in one form or other: Australians, Irish, people from Hong Kong and Singapore who work in companies based in London but have decided to change their lifestyles”.
Technology is pivotal to these people’s moves – which is why the borough council is also considering setting up a special centre where people can use a fast internet to stay in touch with the outside world.
But that’s not a problem for many of the new arrivals who already connect to all corners of the globe.
Sophia Mars, 51, for example, teaches English to Asian businessmen from her laptop.
All she needs is a good internet signal, a pair of earphones and a microphone.
She told the paper, when it’s hot, she sets up her ‘office’ under the trees, when it’s cold or wet, she runs her lessons from a Mongolian yurt, her router powered by solar energy.
These Brexit refugees have been attracted not just by the beauty and welcome of Portugal, but the cheap price of property in these previously ‘ageing boroughs’.
Said mayor Beites: “They end up here because of the low cost of land.
“In Penamacor, almost everything was abandoned. These people want to live simpler lives than people in towns”.
And as DN explains, “contrary to what happens in the Algarve where the majority of the British community lives, this population is of working age”.
For the clearly delighted mayor “all these new arrivals are travelled people, experienced, cultured and this can only bring advantages”.
The local village tabernas and grocery – which all struggled to remain open in the past – are now thriving, with all kinds of ‘new age’ ingredients on the menu or on the shelves.
“The villages have filled with children, an English school has started up, new businesses are opening because of the outsiders”, and even in the town’s park, the old people who meet everyday to play cards have learnt to say “Good Morning”, says DN.
Penamacor’s new life seems to be self-perpetuating.
Paul Large, director of the international school that opened last year said: “Families are moving here because of us…”
The school runs with an alternative curriculum known as Expression Education Alternative. The children “choose what they want to learn. In the morning they have lessons of English, Portuguese and Maths, and in the afternoon they develop their own projects, which could range from human rights to how volcanoes work…”
And for those families who opt for a Portuguese education, the local school has started to expand in a way unseen in decades.
The health centre too has changed totally with the new invasion: “Before we worked almost as a palliative care unit”, chief nurse Vítor Fernandes told DN. “Now we can hold vaccination campaigns, teach healthy lifestyle practices”.
As for property sales, these are proceeding at a fair lick with Irish engineer Jamie Molloy recording his 100th sale since starting up – “all of them old farms to foreigners”.
It has been a revolution, says DN, and considering the country’s ‘forgotten interior’ there may be many more ‘Penamacor phenomena’ to come which could reset totally the dismal forecasts by experts in the past, suggesting that by 2060 Portugal could have lost over 4 million inhabitants and be back at the demographic equivalent of the Middle Ages (click here).
