Many thanks to Andrew Gentile for this insightful article, which we believe will resonate with many of our readers. Grab a beverage of your choice, as this is a comprehensive piece.
Here’s a scene you might recognize if you’ve spent any time in Portugal: You’re standing in your half-finished apartment. The tiles are crooked. The tile installer you hired three weeks ago just noticed. You wait for the words that would come automatically in London or Los Angeles: “My mistake. I’ll fix it.”
Instead, you get a philosophical observation about the nature of old buildings. Or a lengthy explanation involving the previous owner’s choices. Or, my personal favorite, a contemplative silence followed by “Well, these things happen.”
And you think: Did he just… blame the universe?
Welcome to Portugal, where saying “I was wrong” is apparently harder than pronouncing “açorda alentejana” after three glasses of vinho verde.
The Funicular That Killed a Husband
Consider what happened in Lisbon this past September. Hind Iguernane and her husband Aziz Benharref, both from Ottawa, were riding the historic Glória funicular when the cable snapped. The car hurtled down the hill at over 40 kilometers per hour, derailing and crashing into a building. Benharref was among the 16 people killed. Iguernane suffered a fractured hip and shoulder.
The investigation revealed something stunning: Carris, the public transit company, had been using a cable that wasn’t certified for passenger transport. The cable didn’t meet Carris’s own specifications. It wasn’t designed for the funicular’s attachment system. Maintenance records showed tasks marked as complete that were never actually performed.
And the response? The investigating body stated: “não é possível neste momento afirmar se as desconformidades na utilização do cabo são ou não relevantes para o acidente”—it’s not possible at this time to say whether the non-conformities in the use of the cable are or are not relevant to the accident.
Let that sink in. Your cable wasn’t certified for people. But you can’t say if that’s relevant to the accident where 16 people died.
Hind told CBC News what hurt almost as much as the physical injuries. Her brother Youness, who lives in Ottawa, said no one from the Portuguese government has been in touch with Hind since the crash. He put it simply: “We don’t need the money. We need the words, nice words—something.”
In North America, within hours of such a tragedy, there would be press conferences with officials expressing deep condolences. Legal teams would already be discussing compensation for medical expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, wrongful death. Victims’ advocates would be assigned. Crisis counselors deployed. The company would issue statements taking responsibility, promising accountability, announcing immediate safety reviews.
In Portugal? Silence. And when pressed, deflection wrapped in bureaucratic language about what can and cannot be determined “at this time.”
There’s a Portuguese saying: “Quem não deve, não teme.” He who owes nothing, fears nothing. The implication being that if you don’t acknowledge the debt, you owe nothing at all.
The Vet Who Vanished
Or take the story from Funchal that circulated last week. Michael Kröner brought his 14-year-old Jack Russell terrier to a veterinary clinic for treatment of spondylosis pain. The vet prescribed buprenorphine. Over four days, as Kröner repeatedly reported worsening symptoms—severe breathing problems, tachycardia, blood pressure of 220, white gums indicating shock—the vet dismissed his concerns. She attributed everything to the dog’s age and pre-existing conditions. She even suggested he consider euthanasia.
Kröner researched the medication himself. Buprenorphine’s most common side effects? Respiratory depression. The medication has a long half-life. Twice-daily administration can cause dangerous accumulation.
When he pointed this out, the response was: the dog was old, had pre-existing conditions, and the medication certainly wasn’t the cause. Then they wished him “a relaxing night.”
The dog died at the emergency clinic hours later. His heart, already compromised, couldn’t survive the accumulated stress.
And then came the second insult. Kröner arranged for individual cremation through a different clinic. When they went to collect the body from Hospital Veterinário da Madeira, where it was being stored, they discovered it had already been incinerated with other animals. “Collected like rubbish,” in Kröner’s words. No ashes. No certificate. No urn.
The vet didn’t say “I made a mistake.” The vet said, essentially, “Your dog was old, and also we lost his body, but neither thing is really our fault.”
It’s breathtaking, really. A kind of accountability judo where blame gets flipped so smoothly you barely see it coming.
When Cultural Difference Feels Like Contempt
Here’s the thing that makes this so hard for foreigners: when you grow up British or American, the absence of apology doesn’t read as cultural difference. It reads as disrespect.
In Anglo cultures, refusing to acknowledge a mistake signals one of several things, all of them bad: you’re being deliberately evasive. You’re trying to avoid paying for the damage. You think so little of your client that you won’t even pretend to care. You’re passive-aggressively punishing them for complaining. Or worst of all, you’re setting them up—planning to delay, overcharge, or disappear entirely.
So when Portuguese contractors don’t apologize, when doctors deflect, when institutions go silent, immigrants don’t think “interesting cultural norm around honour preservation.” They think: “This person is screwing me over.”
And that interpretation has consequences. It breeds frustration that curdles into anger. It creates distrust that makes every interaction feel like a minefield. It generates a creeping sense of unsafety—the feeling that you simply cannot put your health, your home, your financial well-being in the hands of Portuguese professionals because they will not stand behind their work.
Expats circle the wagons. They create WhatsApp groups dedicated to warning each other away from certain contractors, certain clinics, certain bureaucrats. They develop elaborate defensive strategies: everything in writing, always get multiple quotes, never pay in advance, assume the worst.
And the tragic part? None of this is wrong, exactly. The defensive crouch is rational. But it’s also exhausting. And it means you’re living in a permanent state of adversarial vigilance in the country you moved to for a better life.
The cultural gap isn’t just inconvenient. It’s corrosive.
The Honour of Not Knowing You Were Wrong
Here’s what’s actually happening, and it’s more interesting than simple rudeness: Portugal lives in what anthropologists call an honour culture. Your worth is determined not by your private conscience but by your public reputation. In such a world, admitting error isn’t just acknowledging a mistake. It’s voluntarily destroying your social standing.
The Portuguese have a saying: “Mais vale calar do que mal falar.” Better to stay silent than to speak badly. And what speaks worse than admitting you used the wrong cable on the funicular that’s marketed as a symbol of the city? Or that you didn’t listen when a pet owner warned you about medication side effects?
This is a Mediterranean thing, shaped by centuries of Roman dignity codes, Catholic concerns with moral reputation, and yes, Islamic traditions around honour and face-saving that permeated Iberian culture for 800 years. Portuguese anthropologist José Cutileiro, in his classic study A Portuguese Rural Society (1971), examined how honour and shame function as core values in Portuguese social relations. Cutileiro’s work, published as part of the Mediterranean anthropology movement of the 1960s and 70s, showed how these cultural patterns operate across southern Europe—from Portugal to Greece, southern Italy to North Africa. The specifics vary, but the skeleton is the same: public shame is to be avoided at almost any cost.
Compare this to the guilt-based psychology of the Anglophone world. In Britain and America, we internalized the Reformation’s message that your conscience matters more than your reputation. Guilt is between you and God (or you and your therapist, the modern equivalent). We’re taught that admitting mistakes is actually virtuous. It means you have integrity. It means you’re big enough to own your failures.
In Portugal, admitting mistakes means you’re small enough to be defeated by them.
The Art of the Non-Apology
Portugal is what linguists call a high-context culture. Meaning isn’t delivered through explicit words but through implication, shared understanding, the space between sentences. You’re supposed to read the room, not the statement.
So when your builder realizes he installed the sink backward, he doesn’t say “I installed the sink backward.” He says something like “Ah, yes, sometimes with these older pipes, the configuration isn’t immediately apparent.”
He has acknowledged the problem. He will fix it. But he has done so without the social violence of explicit self-blame.
To Anglo ears, this sounds like weaseling. To Portuguese ears, your demand for a verbal apology sounds aggressive and weirdly obsessed with public humiliation. Why do you need him to say the words? Can’t you see he’s already fixing it?
There’s a Portuguese expression: “Quem desculpa, acusa.” He who excuses himself, accuses himself. The apology is the confession. So better to just… not.
There Is No Appropriate Way to Complain
I was at a dinner party recently with other expats, most of whom have lived in Portugal for several years. The wine was flowing, and inevitably, the conversation turned to contractors.
One friend—I’ll call him David—was describing his ongoing nightmare with a construction project. But what struck me wasn’t the usual litany of delays and cost overruns. It was his description of what happened whenever he tried to give feedback.
“Any attempt at critical feedback,” he said, “gets met with this incredibly emotional response. The guy acts like I’ve personally insulted his mother. He either escalates immediately—like texting back in ALL CAPS—or he just ghosts me. Stops responding entirely.”
David had actually asked his Portuguese friend about this. “What is the appropriate Portuguese way to give feedback to a service provider?” he’d asked.
His Portuguese friend went quiet. Thought about it for a long moment.
“There isn’t,” he finally said.
The table fell silent. Then everyone started talking at once, because we’d all experienced exactly that. The electrician who stopped returning calls after being asked to fix a wiring error. The doctor who became icy and defensive when questioned about a diagnosis. The bureaucrat who suddenly couldn’t find your paperwork after you pointed out an inconsistency.
In Anglo culture, we have entire frameworks for giving and receiving critical feedback. We have professional norms around it. We teach it in management courses. “I” statements. Praise sandwich. Focus on the behavior, not the person. It’s a whole industry.
In Portuguese professional culture, apparently, the framework is: don’t.
Because to criticize is to accuse. To accuse is to attack honour. And an attack on honour must be defended against, even if that means scorching the earth of the professional relationship in the process.
This is the thing that makes expat life in Portugal so disorienting. It’s not just that mistakes don’t get acknowledged. It’s that you can’t even point them out without triggering an emotional detonation that makes the original problem worse.
The Doctor Who Knew Too Much to Be Wrong
Portuguese professional culture is intensely hierarchical. This is a country where you still address your doctor as “Senhor Doutor,” where lawyers and engineers carry their titles like medals, where expertise is meant to project unshakeable authority.
In such a system, visible fallibility is existentially threatening. If the doctor admits she misdiagnosed you, she’s not just acknowledging an error. She’s undermining the entire edifice of professional authority that allows her to function.
The British and Americans have moved toward what you might call egalitarian professionalism. We expect experts to say things like “I was wrong about that” or “Let me reconsider.” We think it makes them more trustworthy.
The Portuguese approach is different. The expert protects the role by protecting the aura. You don’t apologize. You subtly correct course. You speak in passive voice. “It seems the medication wasn’t quite right” rather than “I prescribed the wrong medication.”
Again, there’s a saying: “Em casa de ferreiro, espeto de pau.” In the blacksmith’s house, the skewer is made of wood. Even experts have their blind spots. But they’re not going to announce them at full volume.
The Bureaucratic Bunker
There’s also the practical matter of liability. Portugal’s legal system moves at the speed of a three-toed sloth climbing uphill in January. Consumer protection exists but enforcement is spotty. Courts take years.
So if you’re a contractor or a doctor or, God help you, a public transit authority, explicitly admitting fault is legally dangerous. It can be used against you. Silence becomes rational self-preservation.
This combines with another Portuguese reality: many professions developed in contexts of limited competition and tight social networks. Accountability was informal, relational. You’d fix things for people you knew because you’d see them again. The American model of procedural accountability, written apologies, formal complaints, that’s a recent import. It doesn’t sit naturally in Portuguese professional DNA.
There’s an old saying that captures this: “Deus dá nozes a quem não tem dentes.” God gives nuts to those without teeth. Meaning: life is unfair, systems don’t work the way they should, don’t expect logic. This isn’t cynicism. It’s realism. And it breeds a certain fatalism about demanding formal accountability.
The Transatlantic Chasm
So here’s where we are. You, the Anglo expat, show up expecting:
- Direct admission of error
- Explicit verbal apology
- Proactive correction
- Maybe compensation
- Definitely transparency
You believe these things because you were raised in guilt cultures with low-context communication, egalitarian professionalism, and strong consumer rights enforcement. You think refusing to say “sorry” means refusing to take responsibility.
Meanwhile, your Portuguese contractor/doctor/vet is operating from:
- Honour-based shame avoidance
- High-context indirectness
- Hierarchical authority preservation
- Liability-averse bureaucratic instinct
- A cultural tradition where fixing the problem IS the apology
Neither of you is wrong. You’re just playing different games with different rules.
What a Widow Taught Us
Hind’s story is heartbreaking because it’s so avoidable. Not the accident (though that was too), but the aftermath. A simple acknowledgment from Carris—”We failed to properly vet our cable specifications, and we are deeply sorry for the lives lost, including Aziz’s”—would have cost nothing and meant everything.
Instead, the investigating body issued findings that the cable wasn’t certified for passenger transport, didn’t meet specifications, and shouldn’t have been used, but concluded it “não é possível neste momento afirmar se as desconformidades na utilização do cabo são ou não relevantes para o acidente.” Even when the evidence is overwhelming, even when international media is watching, even when the moral case is crystal clear, the instinct remains: hedge, deflect, avoid direct admission.
It’s not cruelty. It’s not even conscious calculation. It’s the water they swim in.
The Vet and the Dog: A Tragedy in Silence
The Funchal vet story is even starker because it’s so intimate. A man loses a beloved pet of 14 years. He wants answers. Not revenge, not money, just understanding. What happened?
And the response is… nothing. Silence. And when pressed, misdirection. The dog was old. Had pre-existing conditions.
This is where honour culture shows its cruelest face. The vet is probably drowning in guilt. But admitting error means professional ruin, social humiliation, legal exposure. So the armour goes up. The owner suffers twice—once from the loss, once from the refusal to acknowledge it.
How to Survive This Place
If you’re reading this from your crooked-tiled apartment or wondering if you can ever trust a Portuguese vet again, here’s what actually works:
Don’t demand apologies. You’ll just create antagonism. Focus on solutions instead. “Let’s figure out how to fix this” lands better than “Admit you screwed up.”
Avoid direct blame. In Portuguese professional culture, this triggers defensive mode instantly. Keep everything forward-looking.
Ask for specifics. “When exactly will this be corrected?” “Can you put the plan in writing?” Concrete commitments work better than emotional accountability.
Stay calm and formal. “Senhor Doutor, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the best path forward” beats “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
Document everything. Portuguese professionals respect paper trails. Put it in writing. Always.
Expect action, not apology. If they fix the tiles, they’ve apologized. That’s the system.
Remember: the correction IS the apology. This is hard for Anglos to internalize, but it’s essential. When your contractor quietly redoes the work without ever saying the words, he has acknowledged error in the only way his cultural programming allows.
The Wisdom Hidden in the Silence
There’s something almost zen about the Portuguese approach, if you squint at it right. Why do we need people to flagellate themselves verbally? Why isn’t fixing the problem enough?
The Portuguese might argue—though they wouldn’t say it directly—that Anglo culture’s obsession with explicit apology is performative. We want the theater of contrition more than we want the practical solution. We need people to humiliate themselves publicly to satisfy some Calvinist craving for visible penance.
Maybe they have a point. Maybe “I was wrong and I’m sorry and here’s what I’ll do to fix it” is just a more elaborate social dance than “Here, I fixed it.”
Though tell that to Hind, recovering from her injuries in Morocco, still waiting for anyone from the Portuguese government to contact her.
A Country Between Worlds
Portugal is caught between its Mediterranean soul and its Western European aspirations. It wants to be modern, efficient, accountable in the Anglo-American sense. But it’s still animated by honour codes older than the Age of Discovery.
You see this everywhere. In the gleaming new infrastructure funded by EU money, maintained with Portuguese fatalism. In the tech startups full of entrepreneurs who still address investors as “Senhor Doutor.” In the hospitals with world-class surgeons who’d rather die than say “I made a clinical error.”
It’s not changing fast. Culture moves slower than policy. You can mandate consumer protection laws, but you can’t legislate away 800 years of dignity preservation.
The Portuguese have a perfect saying for this: “Vai-se andando.” We keep going. Not with clarity or efficiency or radical accountability. Just… going. Muddling through. Fixing things quietly. Avoiding the words that would make it all so much clearer but feel so much worse.
When Deep Breathing Stops Working
I wrote this essay after more than five years of living in Portugal. Five years of deep breathing my way through bureaucratic labyrinths, contractor no-shows, and service providers who vanished mid-project. Five years of telling myself I shouldn’t complain because I’m privileged to live here. Five years of reminding myself not to impose my home country’s expectations on my host country.
And then 2025 crossed a line.
Two events broke through my practiced patience. The first was the proposed new Nationality Law—promises made, then broken, then remade, then hedged, a masterclass in institutional ambiguity that left thousands of us in limbo. The second was the Glória funicular crash and the response that followed. Not just the mechanical failures, but the failure to acknowledge, to apologize, to offer even the most basic human decency to those who lost everything.
The offense ran too deep. The disrespect cut too close. My self-respect wouldn’t tolerate it anymore.
And yet—and this is the complicated part—I remain committed to understanding and adapting to my host country. That commitment, depleted as my patience has become, sent me on a deeper investigation. Maybe, I thought, I’m still the problem. Maybe my expectations are fundamentally misaligned with Portuguese reality.
So I researched. Portuguese anthropology, cultural psychology, Mediterranean honour systems, bureaucratic culture. This essay is what I found. It doesn’t resolve my concerns. It doesn’t make the indignity disappear. But it explains and, crucially, it contextualizes.
What we experience as foreigners in Portugal—the absence of apology, the deflection of responsibility, the emotional reactions to feedback—is rarely personal. It’s cultural. That knowledge helps. Not much. But a little. Just enough to keep trying.
The Expat’s Choice
You can rage against this. Many do. You can spend your time in Portugal furious that no one will just SAY they messed up, that accountability is always implied and never explicit, that apologies are rarer than hen’s teeth.
Or you can accept that you’re living in a high-context, honour-based, hierarchical culture that operates on different principles than the ones you learned. You can recognize that “I’m sorry” means less here because the culture doesn’t value explicit verbal confession the way yours does. You can adapt your expectations and your communication style accordingly.
Neither approach is wrong. But only one will let you sleep at night.
The Funicular Will Run Again
Here’s the thing: The Glória funicular will eventually run again. Presumably with cables that are actually certified for passenger transport. Presumably with proper oversight. When it reopens, tourists will ride it every day, snapping photos of the colorful Lisbon tiles. Most will have no idea that in September 2025, it sent 16 people to their deaths.
No one apologized in any meaningful way. But they’re fixing the system. In Portuguese terms, that’s accountability. The thing will work eventually. That’s what matters.
And maybe that’s one lesson. Portuguese culture doesn’t give you the emotional satisfaction of hearing someone own their mistakes. But it does eventually give you working funiculars and repaired tiles and corrected prescriptions.
Just don’t expect anyone to say sorry along the way. In Portugal, sorry is the hardest word. And also, apparently, the least necessary one.
“Devagar se vai ao longe.”
Slowly, one goes far. That’s how Portugal moves. Not with the clarity and directness foreigners want, but steadily, stubbornly, toward getting things right. Without ever quite admitting they were wrong.
We Are Not Alone in This Suffering
But here’s what took me five years to discover: we’re not alone in our frustration.
The Portuguese themselves have been saying this for decades. Eduardo Lourenço, Portugal’s most celebrated philosopher and cultural critic, wrote in his seminal work O Labirinto da Saudade that “a sociedade portuguesa… vive sob o modo de uma quase total exterioridade”—Portuguese society lives in a mode of almost total exteriority. He observed that Portugal operates “em obediência ao pendor irresistível de ocupar nela o lugar que implica o mínimo de resistência e o máximo de promoção social segundo a norma do parecer”—in obedience to the irresistible tendency to occupy the place that implies minimum resistance and maximum social promotion according to the norm of appearing.
In other words: even the Portuguese recognize that their culture prioritizes appearances over accountability, the path of least resistance over uncomfortable truths.
Writing in the Observador in 2024, Portuguese commentators described how “a sociedade portuguesa tem, de certo modo, aceitado esses males como normais, adoptando uma atitude passiva”—Portuguese society has, in a way, accepted these evils as normal, adopting a passive attitude. They went further: “Essa aceitação assume-se como um factor entrópico ao crescimento—um ruído constante que drena recursos humanos e económicos ao país”—this acceptance functions as an entropic factor to growth, a constant noise that drains human and economic resources from the country.
The inefficiency doesn’t just frustrate foreigners. It suffocates the Portuguese themselves. In sectors like health and education, the article noted, “a ineficiência no atendimento, a falta de responsabilização dos gestores, e a falta de coordenação entre diferentes serviços criam um ambiente de frustração constante para os cidadãos”—inefficiency in service, lack of accountability from managers, and lack of coordination between services create an environment of constant frustration for citizens.
Economist Nuno Garoupa titled an entire essay “A Passividade da Sociedade Portuguesa”—The Passivity of Portuguese Society. The bureaucratic hierarchies, Portuguese academic research has shown, are “rígidas e lentas, incapazes de qualquer mudança, ineficientes”—rigid and slow, incapable of any change, inefficient.
These aren’t foreign complaints. These are Portuguese diagnoses of their own cultural illness.
The Strange Comfort of Shared Misery.
And for those who’ve lost people they love to this system? For Hind, who lost her husband and received no words of comfort? For Michael Kröner, who lost his companion and received no acknowledgment? The Portuguese approach isn’t zen. It’s agony.
But understanding the culture doesn’t mean accepting its worst outcomes. It means knowing what you’re dealing with—so you can protect yourself, demand better when it matters, and recognize that some things, like basic human decency after tragedy, shouldn’t require cultural translation at all.
Sometimes the deep breathing works. Sometimes understanding helps. And sometimes, you simply have to accept that living between cultures means living with permanent friction.
But here’s the paradox I didn’t see coming: maybe the very frustrations that make me question my choice to stay are the ones proving I finally belong.
Because the indignities I feel—the contractors who ghost, the bureaucrats who deflect, the professionals who never quite apologize—these aren’t immigrant problems. They’re Portuguese problems. The exasperation with a system that drains resources and energy through passive acceptance, the fatigue of living in a culture of exteriority where appearing matters more than being, the exhaustion of navigating institutions incapable of change—the Portuguese feel this too.
When I rage against the absence of accountability, I’m not standing outside Portuguese society looking in. I’m standing inside it, experiencing exactly what Eduardo Lourenço described. When I despair at the bureaucratic inertia, I’m living the “constant frustration” that Portuguese citizens themselves identify as endemic.
Perhaps integration isn’t about learning to accept these patterns with equanimity. Perhaps it’s about learning to endure them with the same weary resignation, the same dark humor, the same occasional bursts of futile rage that the Portuguese themselves have cultivated over centuries.
Perhaps becoming Portuguese means learning to say “Vai-se andando”—we keep going—not with contentment, but with the bone-deep understanding that this is simply how things are. That efficiency is a foreign concept. That accountability is a lovely idea for other countries. That we move slowly, or not at all, and either you make peace with that or you leave.
And if you choose to stay, knowing all this? Then maybe you’ve finally understood Portugal. Not the tourist Portugal of pastel de nata and Fado. But the real Portugal—the one that drives the Portuguese themselves to distraction, that drains their resources and tests their patience, that makes them write essays titled “The Passivity of Portuguese Society” and books called O Labirinto da Saudade.
Maybe belonging doesn’t mean you’ve stopped being frustrated. Maybe it means you’ve earned the right to be frustrated in Portuguese.