It was 8:30 am on Wednesday, February 28, and one by one, men and women made their way, at irregular intervals, under the trees of the Quinta dos Ingleses park in Lisbon. Drowsy-eyed, they emerged from their tents. After crossing the vacant lot in front of Carcavelos beach, popular with surfers, and walking past the posh private British St Julian's School with luxury cars passing by, they reached the train station to get to their jobs in Lisbon.

"I had to pay €400 a month for a room in the city, which, on my €800 salary, barely left me enough to live on," explained Andreia Costa, 49, a Brazilian carpenter and cleaner for Lisbon tourist apartments. Having lived in Portugal for a year and a half, she came to pitch her tent at Quinta dos Ingleses in September 2023, after hearing about it from a friend. "I drew up a strategy and made this decision with one objective in mind: to be able to save up to buy a caravan where I could live with dignity."

While the Portuguese government increased the minimum wage by almost 8% in 2024, taking it to €820 a month (for 14 months a year, or €950 over 12 months), ever closer to the average wage (€1,050 net), rents in the capital soared again in 2023 by more than 20%, according to statistics from real estate web portal Idealista. In three years, rental prices have jumped by 50% and doubled in seven years.

Nailed to a tree, a sign indicated the entrance to Andreia's camp, which she has ingeniously named the "brown campers' condominium" and which she shares with a friend, a cook. The latter, Marcia Alvaro, 42, used to rent a bed in a room for €250 a month. Now, they each live in one of two large tents facing each other. They have set up a kitchen with gas stoves and a precarious shower under a vertical tent with a bucket filled from the river.

'The city is not for us anymore'

Like them, more than 30 precarious workers – mainly Brazilians, but also a few Portuguese and one Angolan – have chosen to live in a tent, some 20 kilometers north of Lisbon, rather than spend most of their meager wages on precarious housing. Nelson Figueira, 21, was starting a new job as a salesman, after a few months as a construction worker. Habi, a metalworker, left an hour ago, explained his wife, Suazi Viegas, 36. Six months ago, the couple left the two-bedroom apartment they shared with five other people in Lisbon for €400 a month, preferring to live in a tent rather than expose themselves to the promiscuity and lack of privacy that their low income imposed on them.

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