António Melo has lived all his seventy-one years in Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. But after the owner sold the building to a tourist accommodation company, they refused to renew his contract. “I fear eviction at any moment,” Melo explains “[but] I have nowhere else to go.”

His story has become common among the Portuguese capital’s 546,000 residents, who receive thirty to forty thousand tourists a day. Elderly residents have been forced out of neighborhoods they’ve spent their entire lives in. This exodus “prevents us from having a community life in the local area,” according to Ana Gago, a University of Lisbon geographer who has done on-the-ground research in the Alfama district. “And that is violent.”

Alfama has seen its resident population crash from a 1980s high of twenty thousand to just one thousand today. Unusually, while prices have “skyrocketed” — in the words of academic Luís Mendes, a housing consultant for city legislators — Lisbon’s overall population is also declining. “The effort rates for rent are now really high — well above the one-third of income everyone speaks of to keep rent at sustainable levels,” explains Mendes.