Ten Things I Wish I Had Known Before Moving to Lisbon
I did not move to Lisbon. I was born here. But I have watched hundreds of people arrive over the past decade and make the same sequence of mistakes, and I have also watched people arrive and get it right. The difference is usually information that nobody bothers to give you before you need it.
The NIF is the first thing. Without a NIF (Número de Identificação Fiscal), you cannot rent a flat, open a bank account, get a SIM card contract, or do anything administrative in Portugal. You can get one at any Finanças office with a passport. It takes one visit and about forty minutes. Do this on your first week, not your second month.
The Via Verde card for toll roads is the second thing if you are driving. Portugal’s motorways are extensively tolled and the system requires either a transponder or advance registration. Renting a car and not having this sorted will result in fines arriving months after you have left the country.
The health system: EU residents can use the SNS (Sistema Nacional de Saúde) with a utenão number, which requires registration at the nearest health centre. Private health insurance through Fidelidade or Multicare is affordable by northern European standards (€30–60/month for basic cover) and avoids the SNS waiting times for non-urgent appointments.
The bureaucracy is slow. The people are not. Lisbon has a specific quality of human warmth that you will not find in every city you have visited — the kind of warmth that exists between a city and its inhabitants, available to newcomers who treat it with the respect it deserves rather than the entitlement of someone who has arrived to consume it.
That last point is the most important one. Everything else is logistics.