Texas families move to Lisbon in search of safer schools

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When Tara Fisher-Muñoz’s daughter started tenth grade at a public school in Lisbon, she asked when there would be a mock shooting. She was confronted with looks of astonishment and informed that this is not done in Lisbon.

“I think my kids had PTSD just from doing the simulation since kindergarten,” he says. She, her husband and their two teenage children moved to the Areeiro neighborhood from Austin, Texas, last July.

Although Austin is a very liberal city, in Texas where the Republicans took the free gun policy to the extreme, the Fisher-Muñoz family looked to Lisbon for an escape from US politics and a high quality, but more affordable, life. They thus joined the growing number of Americans who moved to Portugal for similar reasons.

The whole family speaks Spanish — her husband, Fernando, is Chilean — so it would be natural for them to move to Spain. But the process of getting a visa to Portugal was easier, and “everything in Portugal is amazing,” says Fisher-Muñoz. They came to Lisbon on D7 visas — for retired people and telecommuters who do not need to look for a job in Portugal and want a residence permit.

Fisher-Muñoz’s daughter wants to do animation. The family moved to Areeiro near the António Arroio public arts school. “And it’s very safe — flat sidewalks, no hills,” says Fisher-Muñoz, who loves his neighborhood. They are renting a house but want to buy an apartment soon. “But it’s very expensive here,” she vents, although this is not surprising, given the amount of fellow countrymen she finds with the same interest through her blog.

Fisher-Muñoz started a blog last year called Vegan Family Adventures, to write about travel, food, and the logistics of moving to Portugal. It started out as a hobby, but it’s growing into a source of income as well. “My mission is to spread veganism in Portugal and tell the whole world what the options are here,” she explains.

Fernando works remotely for his company in Austin and has an art studio at LxFactory in Lisbon, where he works three or four times a week. He has made friends with other artists at events. “It’s fun because it’s a very international community.”

When she mentioned the idea of ​​moving to Portugal, her daughter, who is now 16, and her son, 14, asked why. “But then, with the news and the schools with the insecurity problems they have, they said, ‘Yes, we want to move to a safer country’.”

What happened recently proved her right: in May, a gunman killed 19 children and 2 teachers at an elementary school just about 250 km from Austin.

The Fisher-Muñoz family wasn’t the only one who came to Lisbon to find safer schools. Allison Baxley also moved with her husband and two children to nearby Cascais in July last year. They lived in Brooklyn for twelve years, but she and her husband grew up in the small town of Rockport, Texas. When the pandemic started, they were organizing a move to Budapest for her husband. The months dragged by and, with no other international job offer, they ended up making the move on their own.

Baxley really liked Lisbon when he visited the city in 2012, but he wanted to live in a place where his children — aged 3 and 6 — would have space to play outdoors. In Cascais, they found year-round sunshine, proximity to Lisbon and several international schools. After choosing the city, they chose a school: Apprentices, which goes from preschool to 12th grade with teaching in English and Portuguese.

The mother wanted a school that would teach Portuguese to her children without excluding them because they still don’t speak the language. “They’re going to be fluent a lot sooner than I am,” she says, laughing. The 3 year old son already knows the colors in Portuguese. The low cost of the school is a bonus: “We are now paying for two children the same as we paid for my son’s daycare in New York alone.”

In New York, Baxley worked in advertising and her husband in film. He now works on projects remotely. She quit advertising and started a blog, Renovating Life, about moving to Portugal. “It’s about how we’re changing our lives by moving here,” says Baxley. “I’ve been focusing a lot on writing, which I didn’t do in the advertising world anymore,” she says.

“A lot of things are happening in the United States that are both heartbreaking and frustrating,” says Baxley. “We want our kids to be safe at school. With what’s happened recently, it’s more than obvious that things aren’t going in a good direction,” she says.

Portugal is the third safest country in the world. There was a school shooting in 2018, but it did not involve students or school personnel. In February, police arrested a man who allegedly planned an attack on a university. The country is not crime-free, but it does not suffer from shootings often. Anyone who wants a firearm in Portugal has to legally request authorization to carry a firearm, and the laws are restrictive.

“I knew we could never go back to live in Texas after Trump and the ugly things that came out of it. We have a lot of friends and family there, and it’s still hard for me to go back,” says Baxley.

Baxley says his hometown of Rockport, Texas, is similar to Cascais, a “small, coastal, fishing village.” So, after years of living in big cities —Chicago, New York, London, Berlin— in Portugal she felt as if she had returned to her roots. “Only the Portuguese version,” she says, smiling.

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