Nearly three weeks after it began in Porto, Portugal’s protest over the cost of a home showed no sign of fading on Saturday. In Lisbon, a march wound from Marquês de Pombal down Avenida da Liberdade to the Rossio square in the old town; organisers put the crowd at 25,000. Placards read “Housing is a right,” and the chant that carried along the boulevard asked for nothing more exotic than a job and a house to live in.
Once the marchers reached the square, some began pitching tents, which has become the flashpoint of the whole movement. The public security police, the PSP, said it would not allow anyone to stay overnight on the Rossio. Days earlier, officers had cleared a Lisbon camp and detained 55 people.
Porto, where it all started, saw its own procession from Praça da Batalha to Praça D. João I. In the evening a popular assembly there voted to put the tents back up. It was the police dismantling of the first Porto camp in mid-October, which activists say left more than 30 people injured, that turned a local sit-in into a national cause.
Smaller gatherings took place in Coimbra, where about 200 people rallied around symbolic cardboard tents, in Faro with roughly a hundred participants, and in Aveiro and Braga.
The demands are specific. Campaigners want the government to scrap a planned overhaul of rental law that they call an eviction law, cap rents, stop evictions of people with nowhere else to go, bar investment funds from buying homes and bring empty buildings back into use. For Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, it is a problem promised away in several election campaigns and still unsolved. The groups say they will stay on the streets until they get an answer.
