Portugal Is Eating Itself Alive — And Calling It Tourism

Somewhere between an Airbnb key exchange and a tourist tuk-tuk jammed on a medieval hill, Portugal lost sight of what “home” meant. It happened slowly — one renovated flat, one boutique hostel, one “authentic” pastel de nata at a time. Today, Lisbon feels less like a city and more like a theme park built on its own nostalgia.

That’s the uncomfortable premise behind Oportunidade ou Maldição – A Indústria do Turismo em Portugal, the sharp new book by left-wing firebrand Mariana Mortágua and sociologist Ana Drago, published by Tinta-da-China. It asks the kind of question that politicians and investors prefer to leave rhetorical: is tourism Portugal’s greatest opportunity — or its slow-motion curse?

The myth of the golden industry

Tourism now makes up almost 15% of Portugal’s GDP, a figure repeated like gospel in ministerial speeches. But Mortágua and Drago peel back the façade of prosperity to show the price paid by those who actually live here. Beneath the glossy marketing campaigns — “Can’t Skip Portugal”, “Europe’s West Coast” — lies a labour market of precarious contracts, overworked cleaners, and an economy addicted to short-term rent.

The book’s tone is both forensic and furious. “Every euro spent in a luxury hotel,” Mortágua writes, “has already been subtracted from a family’s rent in the neighbourhood next door.” Their argument cuts through the myth that tourism is a tide lifting all boats. In reality, they say, it’s a tide that’s washing the locals out.

Cities turned into content

Drago, known for her sociological work on urban inequality, describes Lisbon as a “city curated for others.” From Alfama to Porto’s Ribeira, façades gleam like filters — a collective act of gentrified self-surveillance. The book traces how decades of neoliberal deregulation transformed housing into a speculative asset and public space into a rentable backdrop.

It’s not just economic — it’s existential. “People start performing their own authenticity,” Drago says in one passage, “because that’s the only thing left to sell.”

In their analysis, the so-called indústria do turismo isn’t a sector anymore; it’s a social operating system. Entire neighbourhoods are repurposed to feed it — cleaning, serving, entertaining, smiling. Portugal, they suggest, has become both the host and the product.

The politics of paradise

What makes Oportunidade ou Maldição explosive isn’t only its critique, but who’s delivering it. Mariana Mortágua, an economist and rising figure of the Bloco de Esquerda, is already a lightning rod in national politics. Her decision to turn the tourist boom into a moral debate enraged real-estate lobbies and the government alike.

For her, tourism is the perfect symbol of the post-crisis mirage: after 2008, Portugal reinvented itself as Europe’s affordable escape. But the recovery was built on cheap labour, golden visas, and the Airbnb gold rush. “We exported our cities,” she writes, “and imported our inequality.”

The reckoning

The authors stop short of prescribing utopias. They talk instead about limits — about cities that must choose between being livable or profitable. Their final chapters evoke a kind of civic sobriety: maybe Portugal doesn’t need more tourists; maybe it needs room for its citizens to breathe again.

In one haunting metaphor, they liken the country to a hotel that keeps selling rooms it no longer has. “We’ve turned hospitality into self-erasure,” Mortágua says. “At some point, the hosts will have nowhere left to sleep.”

Opportunity or curse? Both.

Oportunidade ou Maldição isn’t anti-tourism; it’s anti-amnesia. It refuses the idea that a nation must choose between poverty and overexposure. It’s a demand for self-respect in a country too often told that its only value lies in being picturesque.

The book’s provocation echoes far beyond Portugal’s borders. From Barcelona to Bali, from Naples to Marrakech, the same question reverberates: what happens when your identity becomes your main export?

The answer, Mortágua and Drago warn, is already visible in every souvenir shop selling “authentic” Lisbon tiles made in China — a mirror reflecting a country that sold its soul, one Airbnb at a time.