Locals earning Portugal's monthly minimum wage of 557 euros say they are being priced out of neighbourhoods that they have lived in for decades. Da Cunha, who was paying 220 euros a month, said she cannot afford anything on today's market.
"If things continue like this, pretty soon you won't have a single Portuguese person living here," he said, adding that souvenir shops hawking porcelain sardines and cork handbags have replaced local pharmacies, bakeries and grocery stores.
LISBON, Oct 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Carla da Cunha has a tight budget with which to find a new home in Portugal's newly-fashionable capital, Lisbon, or else she and her two children could be out on the streets.
($1 = 0.8442 euros) (Reporting by Jenny Barchfield , Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit website in trendy Lisbon face eviction with tourism and celebrity boom
It said speculation has been driven by a golden visa programme, which gives Portuguese residency to foreign buyers who spend at least 500,000 euros on real estate, allowing them to travel freely within Europe's 26-country Schengen zone.
In an open letter to the government, the campaign group Morar em Lisboa or 'Living in Lisbon' said local communities that give colour and life to the city are on the verge of collapse and called for rent controls to be introduced.
"Last year was our best year ever, and this year is on track to be even better," she said, adding that six out of 10 of her clients were foreign, with Brazilians, French, Turks and Chinese topping the list of buyers from 43 nations.
"I was born in Lisbon and raised in Lisbon, and now there's just no place for me in Lisbon," said da Cunha, who relies on a monthly government subsidy of 485 euros ($575) to top up her earnings selling handicrafts to tourists.
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