Second Pass

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Portugal — Citizenship by Descent

Not eligible

Descent is not your route — but it is also the narrowest of the ones Portugal offers, so this is less of a closed door than it sounds.

Portuguese nationality by descent runs down a direct line: your parents, their parents, and no further except for people already living in Portugal. Aunts, uncles, cousins and a spouse's family do not carry it, and neither does long residence by an ancestor who never became Portuguese. Sephardic ancestry is a separate question with its own answer on the first page of this quiz — and its own, recently closed, route.

What is open instead depends on what you can do rather than who you are related to. If you are married to or in a recognised partnership with a Portuguese citizen for three years, that is a declaration you can make from abroad. If you can live in Portugal, naturalisation is seven years for nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries and of EU states and ten for everyone else, and almost any permit starts that clock — remote work for employers or clients outside Portugal, living on your own income from a pension or investments, a job offer, study, or an investment permit.

One thing worth checking before you move on: a claim can exist a generation up without anyone having used it. If one of your parents has a Portuguese parent or grandparent, they may have a claim of their own, and if they succeed the position of their children changes with it — a parent who becomes Portuguese by origin opens a straightforward registration for their children at any age.

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