Dora Sampaio

International retirement migration has been typically regarded as a couple's project. Much less is known about single lifestyle migrants who settle and age abroad and those who, after the loss of their spouse, decide to stay put. Informed by a larger pool of 36 life-narrative interviews with later-life lifestyle migrants in the Azores, and structured around four selected portrayals, this paper seeks to explore meanings of place in later life and to unpack the complex set of negotiations that the ageing self undergoes in a context of migration. Drawing on relational and unbound understandings of place, I question traditional assumptions that see single older migrants abroad as vulnerable and dependent, emphasising a more complex set of needs, desires and expectations in (and for) later-life. For these migrants, emplaced living and ageing experiences are ambiguously mixed. The islands are described as places of freedom and self-actualisation, and also “safe ports” in later-life. Yet, this does not prevent intermittent feelings of isolation and loneliness, including the desire to restore some sense of companionship and romantic life.

In this article, I seek to unpack the multiple spatio-temporalities in older migrants’ ideas about return, shedding light on the complex set of motivations and imaginaries that precede return migration. The paper springs from a space-time approach based on the assertion that return aspirations are continuously shaped and negotiated both in and out of place. The discussion is framed around 36 in-depth life narrative interviews with later-life labour migrants living in the Azores, and a seven-month period of ethnographic fieldwork. The role of spatial dimensions such as the place of settlement and the country of origin, and temporal features such as age, length of stay in the host country or stage of life at the time of migration, is discussed in detail. The paper identifies a ‘family-work matrix’ and a ‘home-host country dialectic’ as central forces shaping migrants’ thoughts and possibilities of return. The multi-stranded, time-fluid, space-induced, context-dependent nature of (return) migration decisions is highlighted and it is shown that an apparent satisfactory social integration in the destination country does not, by itself, prevent migrants’ desire to return.

After decades experiencing population decline, high-amenity rural areas seem to be emerging as increasingly attractive destinations. Northern Europeans moving (at least seasonally) to southern European countries seem to embody this trend, particularly as they tend to be no longer geographically limited to the urban seafront and touristic areas, increasingly choosing to settle in rural localities. Focusing on the rural areas of the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal, it is intended to present a diachronic analysis of the arrival and settlement pat-terns of northern European migrants in the region. The analysis is based on data from the 1991, 2001 and 2011 Portuguese censuses, complemented with evidence from a questionnaire-based survey carried out in 2011. Results suggest that, throughout the period under analysis, the rural parishes of the Algarve have gained increasing relevance as places of settlement for northern European expatriates, particularly those at a more advanc...

In this chapter, we aim at filling a gap in the existent scholarship on foreign agricultural labour force in Portugal. We do so by focusing on Moroccan workers (from Al-Maghrib) in the Algarve (Al-Gharb). Although the number of Moroccans in Portugal is negligible in terms of the total immigrant population, they are one of the most representative groups working in agriculture in the Algarve region. The choice to focus the analysis on a fairly small migrant group, although one of great importance for the Portuguese agricultural sector overall, has the potential to allow us to draw an in-depth diachronic anatomy of the recruitment processes and labour incorporation of these migrants into the regional agricultural sector in the Algarve. This may constitute a benchmark for what may have occurred with other migrant agricultural workers, not only in the Portuguese case, but also in other Southern European countries. Our goal is hence to show how the recruitment processes and the labour incorporation of the Moroccan agricultural workers in the Algarve has unfolded in recent years and how these elements help explain present dynamics and anticipate future trends, particularly those imposed by the current economic crisis.