I spent a weekend in Portugal's "coolest" city. Here's why I hated it.

Maybe I didn't imbibe enough wine, but Porto is not all it's cracked up to be

This picture of some hill in Lisbon was found on the Internet.

Two-plus years of pandemic have not put paid to stupid pseudo-stories like Bloomberg’s latest, “These Six Cities Are Emerging as New Expat Hot Spots,” which includes places like Kuala Lumpur in anti-Semitic Malaysia and Portugal’s Lisbon, which Bloomberg describes in an act of truly stunning brilliance as “one of the oldest cities in Europe.” Mr. Bloomberg, I beg you, step up: My cat can do better than that.

Portugal made the mistake of handing out passports to anyone who can claim that their grandmother or whoever way back in the mists of time lived in the tiny wedge of a country. So now you get not only shady types like Roman Abramovich calling themselves Portuguese but yokels like one quoted by Bloomberg who said, “In New York, you’re working so hard all week long. By the weekend you’re exhausted. Here I’m able to enjoy every single day.”

One New Yorker who moved to Lisbon or someplace in Portugal for a spell is Madonna — but she didn’t do it for the passport and she didn’t like it all that much. Material Girl flew the coop and got her derriere back to New York faster than you can say, “What is fado, anyway?”

As always, Madge knows best.

I once visited Lisbon for a weekend to write a column for The New York Sun. It is a sunny city, replete with history and some quirky corners worth exploring, fine. I could have pushed that weekend into a month. But the movement is a little slow, the food a little humdrum, the coast predictably Atlantic. There are other beaches in Europe, and other fishes besides cod. Brazilian Portuguese sounds nicer. Fado is meh-be baby; give me a samba.

Oh yeah, I visited the Douro River area, the renowned Portuguese wine country. There was a river, yes, and some hills, and plenty of wine but no spirit. I ate some things. It was food. But overall, just a pale old glum version of Tuscany.

And Porto? Surely one of the dimmest, most depressing cities in all of Europe. Next to Porto, Cork is Bangkok. I would rather spend a January in Oostende than five minutes in that bizarre, overrated wine depot.

But a country is what it is. You can’t blame the Portuguese for being the sons and heirs of a boring nation any more than you can have a beef with Russians for being Russian. (Although, we can always just blame our parents for everything — that’s always fun!)

No, the issue this column has is with the Californians and other, lesser Americans who, enabled by a shortsighted government, move their big fannies to Portugal simply because they can, but with no prior motivation to do so, and no demonstrable affinity for the place. It’s a kind of laziness that ends up making the place unlivable for the locals.

I can’t think of a single Jew who ever moved to Israel without having some kind of love or passion or longtime pining for the State of Israel beforehand. Such moves are justifiable, and possibly even good.

In all these spectacularly stupid & reductive Bloomberg, CNN what-have-you listicles written by interns or goats I can’t think of a single time when a so-called American expat moved to Portugal because they always wanted to. It is always because they want bragging rights on a cheap apartment with an ocean view, and because they call themselves a ‘digital nomad’ (barf) and don’t mind shuttling across the Atlantic on the godawful TAP airlines — the last time I flew it the airport smelled bad and the aging plane smelled worse; security staff were rude AF — as if climate change were a fiction

So with all due respect to the all those wonderful things Portugal has done for humanity — didn’t they discover Brazil or something, and make a mess of as much of Africa as they could? — enough already.

Call it as it is: Except for locals, Lisbon is a great choice of a place to reinvent yourself if you are a dunderhead or dunce cap who just doesn’t know any better. Or maybe you are spending too much time complaining about your own country instead of doing something about it, and prefer to foist your first-world-problem fickleness on others less privileged.

For all these reasons and also because I don’t own a villa in the Algarve myself, if I read one more two-bit propaganda puff piece about “hipster Lisbon” or amazeballs Porto then do look out, because I might throw up.

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