Foreign Capital Lifts Portugal's Hotel Investment to €508 Million, Passing All of 2025 by June
Investors poured €508 million into Portuguese hotels in the first half of 2026, up 54% on a year earlier and already more than the whole of 2025. Almost all of it came from abroad.
Portugal's hotel market has already had a bigger year in 2026 than it did across all of 2025 — and it is only just past the halfway mark. Investors committed €508 million to Portuguese hotels in the first six months of the year, a 54% jump on the same period of 2025, according to the Tourism Portugal Spotlight H1 2026 report from the property consultancy Savills Portugal. That half-year figure on its own tops the €494.7 million recorded across the whole of last year.
Three transactions did most of the heavy lifting. The purchases of the Corinthia Lisbon, the Penha Longa resort in Sintra and the InterContinental Porto together accounted for €350 million — roughly 68% of the semester's total. That concentration is telling. “Three deals made up about 70% of the half-year's volume,” said Pedro Simões, a senior capital-markets consultant at Savills Portugal. “The record does not reflect a broader base of transactions, but the very nature of the Portuguese market: few deals, of large size.”
Stretch the lens to the past 18 months, from January 2025 to June 2026, and hotel investment in Portugal reached €1.003 billion across 19 transactions, an average of €52.8 million per deal. The money is overwhelmingly foreign: 95.6% of the capital deployed in the first half of 2026 came from outside Portugal, with the United Kingdom, France and Spain the leading countries of origin. “We closed half a year of hotel investment above the full 2025 total, with 95.6% of the capital of foreign origin,” said Alexandra Portugal Gomes, head of research at Savills Portugal.
Geographically, the capital clusters around the biggest cities. Grande Lisboa (Greater Lisbon) drew 61% of the half-year investment, at €312 million, followed by the North with €111 million (22%) and the Alentejo with €70 million (14%). The Algarve, for all its beach-resort reputation, captured just €15 million — a slim 3% of the total.
The buying spree comes even as the operating numbers cool slightly. Between January and May, the national average occupancy rate slipped 1.1 percentage points to 58.7%, while revenue per available room (RevPAR) — a standard measure of hotel earnings — edged up 1.3% to €63.90. Overnight stays grew 1.5% to 28.74 million and the number of guests rose 2.4%, a mix that points to shorter average stays rather than weaker demand. “With guests growing faster than overnight stays, what we are seeing is a change in the pattern of stays, not a weakening of demand,” Portugal Gomes said, noting the data predates the peak summer months.
Performance varied by region. In Greater Lisbon, RevPAR fell 3.6% to €95.80 even as occupancy held steady at 68%. The North posted a RevPAR of €35.80, and the Algarve actually improved, rising 3.8% to €50.30. Madeira turned in the strongest operating showing in the country, with a RevPAR of €89.80 and the highest occupancy rate of any region — and, Savills notes, the fastest operating growth too.
For anyone tracking Portugal's tourism economy, the signal is that international institutional money still sees the country as a place to park large sums. As Simões put it, the arrival of institutional-scale assets shows that “Portugal is proving to be a credible market, capable of accommodating full investment cycles and larger operations.” The flip side, familiar to residents watching hotel rooms multiply in Lisbon and Porto, is that a handful of trophy deals — not a broad, healthy spread of activity — is what pushed the numbers to a record.
