Half a million people over 65 live alone in Portugal

Numbers have one flaw: we get used to them. When the 2021 Census counted 517,146 people aged 65 or over living alone, the news lasted a day. The number stayed. It is worth looking at it slowly.

The country that aged first

Portugal is today the second oldest country in the European Union: 24.3% of the population is 65 or over, and only Italy is ahead of us. The ageing index keeps climbing: 192 older people for every 100 young people in 2024. In 2015 it was around 148.

And it is not a phase. Portugal's national statistics office projects a peak of close to 3.5 million people aged 65 or over at the start of the 2050s. The old-age dependency ratio, today at 39 per 100 people of working age, is expected to approach 73 over this century. No hiring plan, in any municipality, keeps up with that curve on people alone.

Half a million doors

Of all the numbers, the census one says the most: 517,146 people aged 65 or over live alone. That is roughly half of all single-person households in the country. Above 80, nearly four in ten people (37.8%) live in a household with no family nucleus. And the concentration is highest in the inland north and centre, and in Madeira: precisely where teams are smallest and distances longest.

Each of those doors is a routine nobody sees. Most are not flagged cases. They are people going about their lives, until the day a fall, a lapse of memory or a spell of despondency changes everything. With no witnesses.

Who is already knocking on these doors

Portugal is not starting from zero. The GNR, the national gendarmerie, flagged 42,873 older people living alone, isolated or vulnerable in its 2024 Senior Census operation. In Lisbon, the RADAR project, run by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia under a municipal programme, carried out close to 29,000 interviews and flagged more than 11,000 people living alone or only with others their age. Municipalities, parish councils and social institutions run surveys of their own.

These programmes prove two things. First, that flagging is possible: we know where people are. Second, that flagging is not enough: after the census, someone has to go back. And going back every week, to thousands of homes, with teams of half a dozen social workers, isn't stopped by lack of will but by arithmetic.

The arithmetic of follow-up

Run the numbers conservatively. A municipality with 3,000 flagged older residents and five social workers: even if each one manages eight contacts a day, every working day, more than a quarter goes by between contacts with the same person. Whatever happens in that gap is invisible.

That is the gap we set out to close with MILAE: a regular call to every person, and for the teams a daily picture of who needs them first. It does not replace the visit. It says where the visit is needed most.

Portugal's ageing numbers are not a surprise: they are the most announced thing in the country. The question that remains is different. With this curve and these teams, what does each municipality know, today, about its over-65s living alone? Whoever answers with a name and a date is prepared. Whoever answers with an estimate isn't there yet.