Don't know anything about Portugal, Jim. My in-laws have a holiday flat (where they could live year-round if they wanted) in Cyprus - that is another popular option with the advantage that, having once been part of the British Empire, English is as universally spoken as Greek - well on the ethnically Greek part of Cyprus anyway.
I love the idea of moving to Spain, but....unemployment there is worse than in the UK, IIRC and possibly employment disadvantages (for me) with not being a Spanish speaker. (My husband speaks Spanish but thinks it would be really difficult to move & settle there, vs just visiting.) Maybe when we retire!
Another thing is you have to be very, very careful with some of the foreign property buys over here, making you sure you have really good legal representation in the country where you are buying & so forth, that is going to do thorough research & all the right investigation on the property - relevant to that country/local area/etc. You often hear of various people's foreign property ownership dreams all going t*ts up - after they've already upped sticks & no longer have a place in the UK, then some antiquated law turns up or the local municipal authorities where they bought suddenly decide to enforce some suddenly discovered old law that finds the person didn't have the right to have purchased that land or property after all, and then they're SOL.
Like people buying somewhere that is/was supposed to be environmentally protected land, for instance - the local government changes & the new one decides to now enforce that. Or maybe they decide to build a dam or reservoir that is going to flood your land, and perhaps you don't have similar legal protections that you might have in the UK.
Or, another example, in Cyprus, I know, there are ongoing concerns from all the troubles back in the 1970s, when the country was rent in two between the ethnically Greek side and the ethnically Turkish side - so whole communities of Greeks or Turks were quickly evacuated to the other side, leaving abandoned communities where the evacuated parties owned property. I think technically that still belongs to them, even though they haven't lived there for years - effectively ghost towns. I understand a few people are starting to inhabit some of those communities again, although there seems to be quite a stigma attached to doing so. But what if the original owners come back & decide to make a claim, now that the troubles have cooled off between the two sides of the country?
For their part, my in-laws bought their holiday flat in a new build resort apartment complex community, and while they have enjoyed it for several years - they really only use it a couple of months per year, which they have decided hardly seems worth it for having to pay for its upkeep, utilities, management fees, etc year-round. Plus they now have friends with a sizeable house up in a mountain village, who live there year-round, that they could stay with when they go. They don't want to let their flat as a holiday place for strangers (like through a holiday leasing outfit) because the flat is in good condition, they don't want it to get trashed, and they'd just rather not mess with all that.
My in-laws would like to sell their flat, for the right price, but the property market there has bottomed and places aren't selling anymore. My in-laws toyed with the idea of moving there year-round, but in the end, decided they didn't want to - being so far from DH & his brother, and other considerations. So it's created another set of problems for them. They had to set up a separate will/estate plan for Cyprus, because when something happens to one or both of them, the flat there won't be covered under British inheritance laws & so forth.
