“Portugal” Is Now a €257 Billion Brand. What That Actually Means for You.

Sometimes a single number helps you see a country differently.

In late 2025, the consultancy OnStrategy published a study that put an economic value of €257 billion on the Portugal brand. Not tourism revenue. Not GDP. The brand itself.

In the same breath, the study reminded everyone that Portugal’s annual GDP is in the same ballpark, around €290 billion. In other words, the intangible value of “Portugal” as a name, a story and a promise is now close to the entire annual output of the economy.

If you are an overseas founder or investor, this is not just trivia. It is a signal about the kind of platform you are stepping onto when you choose to build something here.

Let us unpack what this means in practice, and how to use it as a lens for your own decisions.

Portugal - The brand

What a €257 billion “country brand” actually is

Country brand valuation sounds like marketing fluff until you look at how it is calculated.

OnStrategy’s study, which was carried out in the first half of 2025 and involved more than one hundred and twenty thousand respondents in twenty five countries, estimates the value of the Portugal brand using a royalty relief method. In simple terms, it asks: if Portugal were a commercial brand, how much would other people have to pay to license it?

To get there, the study measures how Portugal is perceived internally and externally, assigns it a brand strength score, and then combines that with the scale of the underlying economy. The result, in this case, is a brand strength of 62.5 out of 100 and an economic value of €257 billion.

The researchers highlight a few things that drive this:

• the weight of the tertiary sector, especially tourism and hospitality

• the contribution of certain regions and districts to the overall image

• the role of exports, foreign investment and talent attraction

It is a way of saying that Portugal is no longer just a place on a map. It is a recognized label that shapes people’s expectations before they ever set foot here, drink a glass of vinho verde or open a local bank account.

The brand is almost as big as the economy. Why that matters.

The second important detail is the comparison to GDP.

Depending on whether you look at World Bank, IMF or Eurostat series, Portugal’s nominal GDP in 2024 stands around the low three hundred billion in US dollars, which converts to roughly €290 billion at recent exchange rates. At the same time, Portugal’s economy is currently growing at an annual rate of about 2.4%, with the third quarter of 2025 delivering the fastest growth of the year so far, driven mainly by domestic demand.

You therefore have a country where:

• The economy is expanding at a steady, moderate pace

• Public finances are stable enough for rating agencies like Fitch and S&P to upgrade Portugal to the “A” range

• The intangible brand value is now nearly the size of the tangible annual output

For an investor, that combination means two things.

First, Portugal’s image and reputation are becoming structural assets. They help attract visitors, students, workers, entrepreneurs and capital. They make it easier to sell Portuguese goods and services abroad. They colour how people feel when they see “designed in Lisbon” or “Made in Portugal” on a label, or a Portuguese flag on an investor deck.

Second, brand strength is a form of gravity. Once a certain perception consolidates, it becomes much harder for isolated crises or political cycles to flip it quickly. That does not mean everything is safe forever. It does mean that when you build under a strong country brand, you are not starting from zero in the minds of your customers, investors or team.

Where “Brand Portugal” really comes from

The OnStrategy study, and similar work by Brand Finance and others, points to a few pillars that sustain Portugal’s brand value.

Tourism and hospitality are obvious ones. The country has positioned itself as a safe, beautiful, culturally rich destination with good infrastructure and a growing range of experiences. That story shows up in record visitor numbers, strong hotel pipelines and the interest of groups like Hyatt, which is now planning to triple its number of hotels here.

Exports are another. From energy utilities and retailers to wine, footwear, textiles, tech and specialised manufacturing, Portuguese brands like EDP, Galp, and Jerónimo Martins have spent years building weight in global rankings. As these companies grow abroad, they carry the Portugal name with them.

There is also the quality-of-life narrative that has developed over the last decade. Sunlight, food, safety, healthcare, schooling and a relatively balanced pace of life have turned Portugal into a magnet for digital workers, families and retirees from across Europe and beyond.

Finally, there is a quieter shift in the entrepreneurial base. The country now has thousands of startups, an expanding export base, and a more international founder community than at any point in its recent history. “Portugal” is increasingly associated with competent, globally-minded operators, not only with beaches and bureaucracy.

All of these strands feed into the brand valuation. The point is not to memorise the number. It is to recognise that you are not building in a vacuum when you build in Portugal. You are building on top of a story that is already being told about the country.

Why this is good news - and where people still get it wrong

It is tempting to see a strong country brand as a guarantee. It is not.

The upside is clear enough. A venture tethered to Portugal can:

• attract people more easily, whether as guests, customers or staff

• use the Portugal narrative as part of its own story, especially around quality, sustainability and lifestyle

• leverage the country’s reputation when raising capital or building international partnerships

The risk is to treat the brand as a substitute for execution. A strong “Portugal” halo does not make a difficult licensing process easy, it does not speed up municipal approvals, and it does not automatically produce competent teams.

From Burtucala’s vantage point, we see three recurring mistakes foreign founders make when they anchor too heavily on the country brand:

They assume that “everyone wants to be here” is enough of a strategy. This often leads to generic projects – another undifferentiated guesthouse, another cowork without a clear niche, another F&B concept that could be anywhere. In a brand-rich country, generic projects are the first to be forgotten.

They underestimate the friction of operating in the Portuguese system. The brand is world-class; the bureaucracy is not. You still have to navigate CAE codes, licensing regimes, construction bottlenecks, banking, accounting and tax with care and patience.

They forget that the brand works both ways. Just as you benefit from Portugal’s reputation, your venture also becomes part of what Portugal means to residents. If you build something that pushes locals further out of housing, clogs daily life or feels extractive, you are fighting the same brand that attracted you in the first place.

The brand is a multiplier. It multiplies the value of ventures that are well-designed, and it multiplies the visibility of missteps.

How Burtucala uses the country brand as a strategic frame

Burtucala sits at the point where real estate, venture design and operations meet. We do not manage the Portugal brand. We work with it as a fact of the environment.

When someone comes to us with an idea – a boutique hotel, a guesthouse, a mixed-use building with F&B, cowork and wellness, a rural project, a coliving concept – we start by asking how that idea sits inside the current Portugal story.

Does it align with what people already expect and admire about the country, or does it push against local priorities and constraints? Does it add to the “Portugal = quality, warmth, competence” narrative, or does it quietly undermine it?

In a Strategy meeting, we map that context alongside the hard details: site, licensing, layout, capex, staffing and numbers. We look at the venture as a piece of the wider ecosystem, not just as a thing that needs to hit a target yield. If the concept relies entirely on the country brand to compensate for weak fundamentals, we say so.

If it does make sense, our Venture-Build work turns that alignment into a plan. We design space, offer and operations so they make the most of Portugal’s strengths – hospitality, landscape, food, culture, talent – while building enough structure and discipline to handle the system’s slower parts.

The country brand becomes a strategic backdrop, not a vanity slide.

How to decide if Portugal is the right brand platform for your venture

Before you commit to Portugal as the home for a new project, it helps to sit with a few straightforward questions:

Does my concept gain real value from being in Portugal, or could it live anywhere with sun and tourists? If you can swap Portugal for any other warm country and nothing breaks, you may not be using the brand in a meaningful way.

Am I building something that locals can be proud of, or only something visitors will enjoy? The healthiest ventures tap into both: they serve paying guests and add something that residents appreciate, from jobs and services to cultural or social value.

Do I have a plan for the unglamorous parts? It is easy to fall in love with a country’s image. It is harder to organise architects, engineers, accountants, lawyers, builders and operators into a coherent system that can move through licensing and construction without burning everyone out.

If, when you answer these questions honestly, Portugal still feels like the right platform, the current moment – with a strong country brand, solid macro indicators and a clear narrative about quality of life – is not a bad time to plant something here.

And if you want a structured way to test those answers against the reality on the ground, that is exactly what we do with clients every week.