In a response sent to Lusa, the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) states that 393,000 Brazilian citizens reside in Portugal, with a greater incidence in the municipalities of Lisbon, Cascais, Sintra, Porto and Braga.

At the end of 2022, 239,744 Brazilians lived in the country, meaning that this year alone this community increased by around 36%, with around 153,000 having acquired a residence permit since January.

SEF justifies this increase with the creation, in March, of a new model for granting residence permits to citizens of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP), with a specific portal being created for granting these titles.

Since March, more than 154,000 Portuguese-speaking immigrants, most of them Brazilians, have requested a residence permit through the 'CPLP portal', with the document having already been issued to more than 140,000, according to the SEF.

This security service reports that Brazilian nationals represent 74.5% of requests for CPLP residence permits, followed by citizens of Angola, with 9.6%, São Tomé and Príncipe, with 6.4%, and Cape Verde with 4.4%.

The platform for automatically obtaining a residence permit in Portugal for CPLP citizens went into operation on March 13 and is aimed at Portuguese-speaking immigrants with processes pending at the SEF until December 31, 2022 and for those who have a CPLP visa issued by the Portuguese consulates after October 31, 2022.

Provisional data from the SEF also indicates that around 980,000 foreign citizens with residence permits currently reside in the country, including the titles granted within the scope of the “CPLP portal” and the temporary protections granted to Ukrainian refugees.

Foreigners living in Portugal rose from 781,915, at the end of 2022, to 980,000 today.