Jessica Wood had already known Portugal since 2015 and had traveled there every year since. But in 2020, the life of this Briton of Jamaican origin changed drastically when she decided to settle in Lisbon. She confided in the American travel and information site Travel Black, which is aimed at the Afro-descendant diaspora.
Jessica Wood seized a professional opportunity to settle in the Portuguese capital during the summer of 2020. She is now a strategy consultant at the think tank House of Beautiful Business and works to make art more accessible.
“The timing was perfect because I was able to sort everything out before Brexit, which made it easier for me to settle in.”
She was lucky enough to find a place to live thanks to her friends, but she explains that with the boom in Portugal, “the market [de l’immobilier] is saturated”, especially in the neighborhoods that attract foreigners the most, such as Santos or Lapa. These new arrivals have, however, stimulated economic activity as businesses have set up in increasing numbers to meet demand. “Expats have a much higher purchasing power than the Portuguese, and this is changing the landscape of Lisbon”, she observes. His advice for finding accommodation: use Facebook groups, whether for the short or long term.
A rediscovery after the peak of the health crisis
Jessica Wood has lived these two years in the Portuguese capital in a very unequal way, in particular because of the health restrictions on her arrival, in the summer of 2020. “During my first year, I was very isolated and focused on myself. […] There were a lot of challenges to overcome: learning Portuguese, trying to make friends and getting closer to the artistic and creative scene in Lisbon”, she confides. It was from the summer of 2021 that things changed for her, “Lisbon has come back to life”, in his words, and his social life took shape. “I was able to get in touch with a lot of artists and found a community of other black, Portuguese and foreign women, which was an important factor in making me feel more at home here”, she specifies.
On a daily basis, the expat considers that people have a more active social life during the week compared to her native United Kingdom. She herself takes full advantage of it after work, strolling through the city’s many parks or following the train line along the coast from Lisbon to Cascais with friends.
The city, in which you can always come across a “free event” at the bend of the path, overflows with“creative energy”, according to Jessica Wood. Regarding the artistic world, the city has a particularity: “In the absence of a centralized funding system, there are small autonomous structures and collaborative creation activities”, a system that the British expatriate still discovers every day.
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