10 Reasons to Study in Portugal

Do you have that one short friend who’s always telling you how great it is to be short? Well, Portugal’s that smaller friend of yours, and it keeps showing you why being a small country has its advantages. The beach is always nearby, for example – in Porto or Lisbon, you’re rarely more than 20/30 minutes away from the beach. If you get a free day from school, you can visit any city in the country for a daytrip and be back in time for school next day. Or you can get to know the country a lot better in a weekend.

Even though Portugal is one of those rare countries in Europe where people actually make an effort to understand you in the street, whether you speak to them in English, Spanish or even Russian, if you study in Portugal you’ll learn your way around some basic Portuguese. If you do learn Portuguese, you’ll be speaking the world’s sixth most spoken language: this is a great CV-booster once you graduate and can help you build links with people in four different continents (South America, Europe, Africa and Asia).

The rain in Spain might stay mainly in the plain, but Portugal much prefers its sunshine. Most years we receive only around 90 rainy days across the country – and regions in the south of Portugal, like Alentejo and the Algarve, boast more than 300 sunny days every year.

The Portuguese have a passion for the ocean that crashes upon the counrty’s shore. This ocean allows you to learn or practise all kinds of watersports: we’ve got incredible scuba-diving spots, world-class waves to surf or body-board, and a long history of yachting. And if you’re not into any watersports, it’s pretty to look at and fun to swim in anyway.

What is your definition of fun? Drinks at trendy bars, a wild street party, clubbing the night away? Or are you into the quieter pleasures like a great meal with good company and conversation and an afternoon in the beach? Are you into mountain biking, skateboarding, paintballing? The Portuguese love to have fun, in every way, every day. Whatever’s your pleasure, you’ll find it here.

Study in Portugal, and you will never, ever go hungry… unless you’re a vegan. Most of our dishes are based on meat, fish or eggs. But, if you’re not vegan, the food here is really, really good. The meals are hot and heavy, but ‘sharing dinners’ and ‘Portuguese tapas’ are now very fashionable, so you don’t really have to leave the restaurant feeling like you’ve just been stuffed full by your grandma. Traditional Portuguese desserts are sweet, based around different combinations of egg, sugar and cinnamon, more often than not.

Everything you heard about the hard-hitting financial crisis and the record-breaking unemployment rates is true. But the truth is, if you study in Portugal there are opportunities that you gain access to over here. While you do your degree, there are hundreds of start-ups and small companies who would love to welcome you into their team. Whatever language you speak, it is a language that will be useful to these companies that are trying to grow across the world. After your degree, if you get good grades, network hard and learn Portuguese, doors will be open to you both in that local start-up scene and in larger international businesses in some of the new world’s monster economies, like Brazil and Angola.