Life in Portugal 2024: Pros and Cons of Living as an Expat on the Silver Coast

Is the Silver Coast the best place to live in Portugal? We’ve been living as expats in Portugal for almost a year. Moving abroad after 50 is filled with adventure, and in this video we’ll share how we’ve navigated some of the pros and cons of life as expats on the Silver Coast of Portugal. Life as an expat in Portugal is exciting, but there are challenges (like moving to any new country). In this video, we talk about the ups and downs of living on the Silver Coast of Portugal.

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Hi, we’re Matt and Dawn, The Unretirees. As we approached the traditional retirement age, we realized we had no desire to retire. But we didn’t want to put off our dreams of living abroad and traveling the world, either. We decided to unretire abroad. We live on the Silver Coast of Portugal and work remotely. Subscribe to our channel for more content about expat life, remote work, and travel and adventure over 50.

Over the last couple years, the Silver Coast of Portugal has topped the lists of hot spots for expats, retirees and Digital Nomads, but we couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the people who are writing those lists didn’t actually live here. So what’s it really like to live on the Silver Coast of Portugal? Well, we moved here last year and in this video we’re going to be sharing the pros and the cons and the realities of life on the Silver Coast of Portugal. Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m Dawn, and we are The Unretirees and last year as I was approaching the traditional retirement age, we knew we didn’t want to retire but we also didn’t want to put off our dream of living abroad and traveling the world either. And so today we live as digital expats on the Silver Coast of Portugal and this channel is about living abroad, remote work, and travel and adventure over 50. If you’d like to see more content like this, click the like button, hit the Subscribe button, and make sure you click the bell notification so that you’re notified whenever a new video comes out. So there’s lots of reasons why the Silver Coast has topped lists for expats retirees and Digital Nomads. It’s not hard to understand: there’s pristine beaches, there’s tons of hiking and biking trails, great food, welcoming people. I mean, that’s why we moved here when we came here nine months ago. But in those nine months there have been some pros and cons that we’ve discovered of life on the Silver Coast of Portugal. Well, before we get to those let’s define what the Silver Coast is. It really is a 93 mile strip that runs on the coastline of Portugal from just north of Lisbon to just south of Porto, and really although some maps will say the silver Coast goes in quite a ways Inland we’re sort of thinking about the coastline — maybe 10 miles from the coast — as being the Silver Coast on that 93 mile strip. And the reason that people move here, the more common reasons, they’re really five of them: weather, lifestyle, location, authenticity, and real estate prices. So a couple of caveats before we really get started. The first is is that we’ve only been living in Portugal for about nine months and so to large degree this may still be first impressions. We are still exploring and learning and finding out more and more about Portugal, which is part of the adventure of moving to a new country. But we may think very differently as we get more seasoned here in terms of our experience. And secondly our pros may not be your pros and our cons may not be your cons, but they may give you some ideas as you think about moving to Portugal or wherever you may be thinking about moving. That’s right, and I think also it’s important to know that when we say cons these are really just adjustments that we are making as part of living in a new country. My favorite advice that we got when we moved to Portugal was Portugal will not change for you, you must change for Portugal. And so when things feel a little bit challenging or frustrating what we have found helpful is that we kind of run through this mental model of three questions that we ask. The first one is, is this an experience problem? The second is, is this an expectations problem? Or, is this an attitude problem? Now there are legitimately bad experiences, like objectively bad experiences, and fortunately we have not had any of those, but people do have them and that valid. Most of the time it’s either an expectations problem or an attitude problem and so that’s what we mean when there are just adjustments that we know that we need to make as part of life in a new country. I will also say that nothing is a complete pro or con. Nothing’s all good or all bad, so in this video we’re going to use a five point scale: one being not that great five being really great, and just to kind of give you an idea of our impressions of the pros and cons of living on the silver Coast after nine months. Okay, well let’s break these down. [Music] So the first reason that people move to the Silver Coast of Portugal is weather. Now the Silver Coast has a temperate climate meaning that the highs in the winter maybe in high 50s or very very low 60s and in the summer the highs are going to be in the mid 70s, struggling to break 80, which is great so it’s not too hot and it’s not too cold. It does get some rain here. It’s more rainy in the Silver Coast here than it is in the Algarve or in Lisbon, but it’s less rainy than it would be in a northern city like Porto or Braga. And weather was a big factor for us as we were moving here. We wanted to make sure that for us it wasn’t too hot or too cold, we wanted to be able to be outside more often than not, and we love the sunshine, so we wanted to have lots and lots of sunny days. So after living here for 9 months what do you think are the pros? So we haven’t lived here a full year yet, so maybe ask us again in a few months but so far it has been very comfortable even on days when it’s very hot even just 10 or 20 miles Inland it’s still very mild here. What do you think some of the cons are? Well, look we moved here just before the rain began in the middle of October and it’s been more rainy than we certainly expected. Now, we need the rain so it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and there were plenty of sunny days throughout the even this even the rainy season, if you will but it rained more days than we were expecting it to rain, and so it was an expectation that we needed to change. Now it is true that people around here who are more familiar or who have who lived here they said that it was an unusually rainy winter. We’ll have to find out as we stay here more and more years. So another adjustment that we had to make was to the cold. Now we had heard that it is colder indoors than it is outdoors in the winter time but at the time we were living in the Northeast and we thought that’s nothing we can we can handle a little cold. But we were really really wrong. Yeah, the cold is a real thing. I mean it can be bone-chilling sometimes inside, which is, and I don’t know, it’s probably it’s probably because the materials that are used to build buildings and homes is just different here than it is at least from what we were used to in the Northeast. There also maybe different insulation expectations that go on. But it’s it’s pretty cold. I mean, in fact for most of the winter we had to run our heater 24/7. It’s not just a Silver Coast that this is true for. It’s true up and down all of Portugal. We have some friends that are in Lisbon and and they’re in a new building, new windows, new construction, and you would think that that would have it fixed, but it’s cold there in the winter. They have the heaters going there under blankets all that stuff because it’s just cold. So the cold is a real thing. The other adjustment we needed to make was dampness. Dampness is also really a very real thing. When we first stayed here for about a month when we closed on our house from late October until late November we we found that things were always wet. Our linens, our towels (even before we used them), our towels, our clothes. Everything felt heavy and wet all the time and we had never experienced something like that. So when we moved here we knew that we were going to have to address those issues. So we did a few things. Number one is we had some exterior cracks um on the house fixed that were letting moisture in. We bought two dehumidifiers. We also got some things for the closet to cut down on humidity. Now I will say that we haven’t had that problem since we’ve moved here. Those things did fix the problem, but that was something that we had to manage for sure. So what do you think about the weather? How would you rate it? Well, even though it is cold sometimes and even though the dampness is a real thing, the days when they’re spectacular are just spectacular, and a little bit of cold and a little bit of dampness we can sort of deal with in order to get get the benefit of those glorious, glorious days. So we’ll take that over shoveling snow in the Northeast like we used to do. So I’m going to give it a four. [Music] So next let’s talk about the Lifestyle here on the Silver Coast and why so many people find it appealing. So what are the pros? There are a lot of pros. The lifestyle here is amazing. There’s hiking and biking and water sports and golf and hanging out at the beach. We spent most of our lives in Northern California and it really is very similar, just less crowded and less expensive. It’s very laidback and relaxed. I mean, it’s life at the beach! What’s not to love! I know! What do you think some of the cons are though? Well, some of the activities that you may be used to from wherever you’re moving from, like we were from Northeast, they’re just less frequent or less opportunities here. So I’ll give you an example: golf is a good example. I like to play golf, but there are just fewer courses in the Silver Coast than there is say in Lisbon or the Algarve or up in Porto. And so the closest golf course for me is about 45 minutes away which is, you know, it’s quite a drive. I think another example would be restaurant choice. Now let me say this there are some fabulous restaurants in the Silver Coast and many more that we will discover, so I’m not complaining about the food here on the Silver Coast. It’s amazing. But I do think that in a town like Lisbon or in Porto you’re just going to have in these population centers you’re going to have more choices of different kinds of restaurants than you do in the Silver Coast. So I think that that’s another thing that sort of is a an opportunity that’s different. There are some things that are harder to find on the Silver Coast. Also shopping is a little bit more challenging. I would say that the Silver Coast does have those things, it’s just harder to find where to go to get them. Most of the shops, many of the businesses, don’t have websites so it’s not like you can just go on Google and say where can I find something. You really have to check around and even though we were able to eventually find everything on our list we relied a lot on our expat community to kind of guide us and that was really helpful. So how would you rate the lifestyle? Well look, some of the things limitations, there’s just fewer golf courses on the Silver Coast, it’s hard to find a size 13 shoe on the Silver Coast, but we’re exploring and finding new things all the time, so new restaurants and new shops and new places to get the specialty items that may be a little bit difficult to find. I actually think that to a large degree some of this is a matter of time. That the longer that we’re here in Portugal the more and more these things will be just easier to handle, so you know perhaps ask us in another year. We may have a different answer but for right now I’m going to give this a four. [Music] So another reason people love the Silver Coast is location. Now where we are we’re basically the same distance to Portugal’s three largest cities, which is Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra. Now you can live on the Silver Coast and choose to live closer to Lisbon or closer to Porto. We happen to be be right smack dab in the middle. And you know we’re in the middle of the whole country of Portugal as well. Portugal is only 349 miles long and about 135 miles wide. If you think about, if you’re from the United States, if you think about the state of Indiana, that’s about the right size in terms of thinking about the the size of Portugal. And that means that we can get from where we are in Nazaré we can get to just about any place in Portugal in just a matter of a few hours. We can travel to the very top in about 3 hours the very bottom in about three, three and a half hours, and we can go all the way to the West, sorry, all the way to the east (the west would be a problem) all the way to the east side of Portugal in about two and a half hours. So everything is very accessible. So that means Lisbon and Porto are easily accessible to us, the Duoro Valley, which is the wine region and the port region here in Portugal, very accessible. We can be down the Algarve very easily. So we can not only explore those places but we can find more and more new places all the time just by driving. And in fact, one of the things that’s fun is Spain is easily, because Portugal’s only two and a half hours wide, Spain is right there on the other side. So what are some of the pros? Well, I think this might be my favorite thing about living on the Silver Coast, because we love to take road trips. We take a lot of road trips. We just got back from a couple of days in the Alentejo region. We heard about a palace in a forest that was 90 minutes away, we could just hop in our car and go. We’ve driven up to the Basque Country in Spain and France, and that trip was actually pretty long, to be fair, but we did it. So what do you think the cons are? Gosh, I don’t think there really are any cons. This is really, for us, a perfect location and I’m going to give it a perfect score of five. Absolutely. [Music] So what what do we mean by authenticity? Well some people say that the Silver Coast is a little more authentic experience of Portugal than other parts. Now you would have to ask a Portuguese person if that’s actually true, but the Silver Coast does seem to be far less commercialized than other parts of Portugal. We’ll give you an example. We were down in the Algarve a few months ago and we saw a Starbucks and a Baja Fresh. Now nothing against that, we love both of those places. We went to both of those places! But the point is there’s no Starbucks on the Silver Coast. There’s very few chain American brands outside of a few fast food restaurants, maybe some American brands at the mall, but for the most part we really don’t see those kinds of things here on the Silver Coast. So what do you think some of the pros are of that? Well I think you know anytime you have a restaurant that is owned by a family, I think that the likelihood of it being a more authentic experience is very high. And the same is true with the shops. I mean, I do think when an owner is involved in those sorts of businesses I think for the most part the experience is just better. Any cons? I don’t think there’s really any cons to that. I mean, we really love supporting local businesses here on the Silver Coast. I will say that sometimes we do miss familiar brands and I know that’s not a very cool thing to say when you move to a new country and probably anybody who moves to a new country experiences that. We love the adventure of trying new things, trying new foods, all the adventure. We do that all the time but, to be honest, sometimes we just want to grab some Chipotle or walk into Sephora and get my favorite mascara. So again, I know that’s not very cool to say but that’s just real, and there really aren’t a lot of those places here on the Silver Coast. The good news is though that we can always go to Lisbon or Porto to get them but uh that’s probably something that’s a little more challenging here. So how would you rate authenticity on the Silver Coast overall? Well I think it’s a strong four. I mean, there are things that I miss, I think things that we both miss, but the reality is that we could drive to Lisbon or Porto and for the most part find something equivalent or close to it there. I think one of the things I do like is when we moved from the United States here to Portugal, it is nice that it doesn’t feel like a different version of America. Yeah. Right, that these are are really Portuguese brands for the most part that we see around us. Portuguese restaurants, Portuguese shops, Portuguese stores in the mall, for the most part. And it’s kind of nice to to feel like you’re not just in a little America. I like the fact that we moved to a new country to experience a new country I think that’s a pro [Music] So let’s talk about real estate. One of the reasons that so many people are moving to the Silver Coast is the attractive housing options. Well that’s right, and the Silver Coast, even though prices have gone up they’ve gone up all throughout Portugal as well as throughout lots of places in the world, but the Silver Coast still remains relatively affordable compared to other places. For example you can buy a condo here for under €100,000 or you could spend well over a million dollars or a million euro for a house if you wanted to. That range is just that big. But you get a lot more for your money than a in a beach community than you would in any other part of the United States or most parts of Europe, for sure, so your money just goes a lot farther and that’s a big draw for expats, for retirees and for Digital Nomads. So what are the pros? Well, I don’t think that we could find this property, this close to the beach, with this weather, anywhere else at this price, anywhere else in Portugal or really anywhere else in Europe. I think that the lifestyle upgrade that we got when we moved to the Silver Coast was immense and every day it still feels like a dream. If you want to know more about our experience house hunting in Portugal watch this next video. [Music] Uh Uh Uh There was a part there I don’t know you’re talking this and I almost cracked every like… What did I do? [Laughter] do this so hard not to laugh Pastel de nada this Alright