PORTUGAL

Portugal's massive emigration waves — to France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Brazil, Angola — have scattered Portuguese men across the globe for generations. These men left fishing villages and farm towns as teenagers, built roads in Paris and houses in Zürich, and sent money home to families they barely knew. The "emigrante" is a celebrated figure in Portuguese culture — hard-working, sacrificing, loyal — but the psychological cost of decades of displacement, identity fragmentation, and family separation is never part of the celebration.

The interior of Portugal — the Alentejo, Trás-os-Montes, the Beiras — is emptying. Entire villages have populations under 100, most of them elderly, many of them men alone. These men represent the last generation of a way of life that modernity and EU agricultural policy made untenable. They tend their olive groves and vineyards, drink their wine in empty cafés, and die without anyone noticing for days. Portugal's coastal cities — Lisbon, Porto — have experienced a tourism boom that creates its own masculine crisis: men who can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods where they grew up because Airbnb has priced them out, displaced by the very tourists they serve. The contrast between the Instagram version of Portugal and the reality lived by its men is a national saudade in itself.