Lucía Ramírez: Lisbon in seven months, because her consultant knew which SEF office still worked

Lucía arrived in Lisbon from Santo Domingo in late 2023 with a tourist visa and a cousin who had promised her a room. The cousin’s room disappeared within a week; she slept on a sofa in Odivelas for the first three months while she worked the morning shift at a bakery in Benfica. She filed her first Manifestação de Interesse through SAPA — the online portal — in early 2024 and heard nothing for nineteen months. By the time she contacted a consultant through our directory, SEF had been dissolved and replaced by AIMA, the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo, which had inherited a backlog of over four hundred thousand pending files.

Her consultant’s first move was to pull her SAPA receipt and check which regional AIMA office her file was assigned to. The answer was Odivelas — one of the three regional centres with the longest queues. The consultant walked Lucía through a juridical procedure called avocação de competência: she could request, with documented urgency grounds, that her file be reassigned to the AIMA office in Beja, which was processing significantly faster because the local workload was lighter.

The urgency grounds the consultant chose were two: Lucía had an elderly diabetic mother in Santo Domingo whose only source of income was the money Lucía was sending home from her bakery job, and Lucía had been offered a formal contract by the bakery owner on condition that her residence card be issued by the end of the Portuguese fiscal year. The request for reassignment was filed with the right legal citations in the body of a two-page petition. It was accepted in forty days.

Once the file reached Beja, processing took a further eleven weeks. The Autorização de Residência arrived by registered post at Lucía’s shared flat in Odivelas on a Tuesday morning. She has since moved to Beja — the consultant’s half-serious joke was that the city was due a thank-you note from her — and has transferred her bakery contract to a padaria in the city centre.

The lesson of Lucía’s file is one we are tired of writing about: the Portuguese regularisation system is correct in theory and broken in practice, and the only people who can navigate it in less than two years are the ones who have paid a consultant who files in it every week. The avocação de competência procedure is not secret. It is in the law. But very few applicants know it exists, and even fewer know how to write the two pages that make it work.