Wedding in Portugal

Slipshaney

Hi All - getting married next year, pre marriage course done, but confused about the paperwork required. We want to get married "officially" in Portugal and not have 2 wedding dates (if that makes sense)

Im just confused about the translations requirements etc

Can anyone shed some light on what exactly I need to do?

Thanks in advance

MeTV

See here, Slip. Note the requirement that at least one of you must be present in the country for a minimum of 30 days. Would suggest you contact the DFA for clarification/assistance.

For your consideration, we're going down a similar route of getting married officially abroad and doing nothing here (for various reasons). After much looking around, eliminating various countries based on legal/residency/religious requirements that we didn't meet, we narrowed the field down to a few and eventually settled on Cyprus as, apart from offering some stunning venues:
- We only need to be in the country for 3 working days before the wedding,
- English is a recognised language over there so no need to get any paperwork translated,
- For the same reason, no need to have a translator present at the ceremony, which many countries required, even if one or both of us was fluent in the language and which we felt would make the ceremony a little ... less "special" and personal.

We spent 2 weeks looking at trying to organise everything ourselves (from the paperwork to the ceremony to the reception), just hiring a coordinator over there as a point of contact. However, this week, purely for the sake of looking at all possibilities, we had a quick look at some wedding packages offered by travel agents, and that's now the route we're going to go down. We had initially dismissed the idea of a package as we didn't think it would provide any flexibility in personalising our big day to be what we wanted it to be, but, after reading up on a few of them, we've found them to be extremely flexible so I'd suggest maybe looking into it yourself. Most importantly, with regards to this post, they'll advise you on all the paperwork and legalities and take care of them for you. They'll also provide you with a coordinator here or there or, in some cases, both. The latter is what we're going for as it allows us to organise everything with a direct contact here, through a contact with local knowledge there and we can even pop over for a few days to meet with the local coordinator to finalise our venue selection, etc.

A lot more than you asked for, I know, but, as you seem to be at the same point we were at a few weeks ago of just starting out on your planning, I thought sharing our progress so far might help you in some little way

Slipshaney

Thanks for the detailed response!

I had a chat with my contacts in Portugal - and apparently the law changed 3 years ago, so the 30 days residency is now gone

MeTV

Guess we were too hasty in ruling Portugal out, so Think we still would have ended up going with Cyprus, though

What's the residency requirement now?

Slipshaney

I dont think there is any to be honest - once the paperwork is in order (I hope) all will go ahead OK!