The main address for this site is http://expat.silvert.org. All other sites are mirrors and may be out-of-date.

Contacting the Webmaster

This site is run by William Silvert, who gets a lot of requests for help and advice from people who stumble across this site. I will be happy to hear from you and to help if I can, but please read the following information first.

Many questions can best be answered by organisations such as AFPOP - Associação de Proprietários Estrangeiros em Portugal (Association of Foreign Property Owners in Portugal), which offers services in English, German and Dutch. They can advise you on finding lawyers for example far better than I can. Their website is www.afpop.com.

There are numerous books directed at expats - in your home country there may be such books to help you with tax matters and so on (for example, there is a book called Canadians Resident Abroad to advise Canadian citizens about such matters - it gets revised every several years). One worth mentioning is "Living and Working in Portugal" by Sue Tyson-Ward (HowToBooks, Oxford, third edition published in 2002). This is a basic but useful guide for anyone moving to Portugal and addresses many of the questions I receive.

I cannot provide advice on language schools, business contacts, tour companies, or any other commercial enterprises. I am simply an individual who lives in Portugal, not a Chamber of Commerce. While I am happy to share my personal knowledge, I am not a tourist office or an immigration counselling service.

If you are planning on getting married in Portugal, make sure that you have a contingency plan! I get lots of queries from people who want to get married here, and in almost every case they end up going to Gibraltar for the wedding (as we did). I cannot help with marriage issues.

Many of the people who write me have Portuguese ancestors and want to claim Portuguese nationality. This is a very difficult area, the law and the practice are not at all similar, and I really cannot be of any help in this area.

In general, please check my pages on the Portuguese bureaucracy before contacting me. If you want to know about appliances that you can bring to Portugal, I have a page about that too, as well as some other practical advice.

But if you still have questions that you want to write me about, please include some information that can help me figure out where you are and what will work for you. Many of the e-mails I get are from hotmail or yahoo addresses, and I don't have any idea whether they are coming from America, Asia, Europe or even within Portugal. I may need to know whether you are married, divorced, a student, retired, etc. - it depends on the question. The more you tell me, the more I can help. You can write me by sending e-mail to expat@silvert.org.

Special note to TV producers, especially in the UK - do not ask me to help you contact expats for a TV programme on the life of expats in Portugal. I get so many of these that I do not even bother replying any more. Isn't there any other subject suitable for TV?

This site is maintained by William Silvert, to whom all questions, comments and complaints should be addressed. You are also welcome to record your visit on the guestmap.