“Half a dozen months and so many different faces.” Report on the municipality north of Lisbon with more immigrant workers

À At lunchtime on a weekday, the city center does not radiate what the statistics say. Of the few people you see on the street, very few are foreigners. Only at a construction site near the town hall can you hear some workers speaking Spanish. Other men are seen sitting on a bench. And yet, no one would say that this is the third municipality in the country with the highest proportion of foreigners among salaried workers, as revealed by a recent study by the Bank of Portugal. Cinfães is just after Odemira and Ferreira do Alentejo. It is the only municipality above Lisbon in which more than one in three workers comes from abroad. But there is a particular context there. What is not overwhelming at first sight has a lot of history – and circumstances – painting the picture that makes that point, on the border between the districts of Viseu and Porto, an exception on the map .