For us, yes, but not for the reasons the guides give, and not without some hard mornings. If you are weighing this move with small children, here is the honest version. What has been genuinely good, what has been harder than anyone told us, and one evening in a potato field that showed me what I had actually been looking for.
Most articles will tell you Portugal is safe, sunny, and family friendly. All of that is true. None of it is the part that mattered most once we were here.
What has genuinely been good
The food at school is real. This is the thing I did not believe until I saw it. Lunch is cooked from scratch, soup first, a proper plate after, and the break is long enough to eat it slowly rather than cram it in. Our daughter eats a hot, made that morning meal every day at pre school here in Central Portugal, and it costs 1,66 euros a day. Coming from a culture of packed lunches and thirty minute breaks, this took time to take in.
Children are visible here in a way they are not everywhere. They are in the cafés in the evening, at the festivals, part of the ordinary traffic of a place rather than something to be managed and kept separate from adult life. Nobody sighs when you arrive somewhere with two small ones.
And the young ones take the language almost without effort. Ours started pre school in September with none of it, and she is already coming home with words, trying them out on the woman at the bakery, picking the sounds out of the air faster than I can. She is still learning, and I can watch it happening in a way I never expected to see.
What has been harder than anyone told us
The system for young children is split, and nobody warns you. A child under three sits under social security, in creche. A child of three and over sits under education, in jardim de infância. If you have one of each, you are dealing with two separate administrations that do not resemble one another, and you will fill in a great many forms before you understand which building is for what.
For the practical detail, including the fact that creche can be completely free, see our post on whether creche is free in Portugal.
I do not want to make this sound like paradise. Some mornings are grey and damp and the language is a wall and I miss things I did not expect to miss. The honest version includes the days when it is simply hard, and pretending otherwise does nobody any good.
The evening that answered the question
There is one evening I keep returning to, from our first summer.
We went to help the neighbours with the potatoes, at six or seven, when the sun had come off the field. We asked if we could help and then we were simply in it, all four of us, down the rows.
I gave the children ten minutes. That is the measure of what I had come to expect. But they did not need to be shown. They watched for a second and then they were in the soil with their hands, lifting the potatoes and putting them where potatoes were supposed to go, and getting it right, past the point where I kept looking up expecting them to be finished. They were two and four. It went into them as though there had been a space kept ready.
That was the evening I understood what I had wanted for them. Not the country, or the weather, or even the outdoors, but this.
I wanted them to know that food comes out of the ground, and that the ground is a place you can put your hands into.
So, is it worth it, with young children? For us it was, on the strength of an evening in a potato field more than anything on a spreadsheet. But I would not tell you it is easy, and I would not tell you it is Portugal that does it. I think it is the way life happens to be arranged here, and that is a quieter thing to sell.
One note. The practical details here, creche, school systems, costs, change over time and were current in 2026. Check the current position before you act on it.
This is one piece of a much longer road. The whole of our first year with two small children, the dreaming, the paperwork, the winters, and the summer it finally rested, is in the book: Moving to Portugal: The Honest Version. https://aterraliberty.com/book Our real family, not another guide.