For years, the Azores have increasingly projected an international image of sustainability, tourism growth, environmental prestige, and geopolitical relevance. The islands have become symbols of Atlantic beauty, ecological branding, scientific potential, and strategic importance between continents. Yet beneath that carefully cultivated image lies another reality — quieter, less marketable, and deeply structural: the persistence of poverty, inequality, and material deprivation across significant sectors of the population.
A new report released this week by the Nova School of Business and Economics, in partnership with Fundação “la Caixa” and BPI, offers one of the clearest portraits yet of those contradictions.
The sixth edition of Portugal, Balanço Social 2025, analyzed poverty not only through income levels, but also through material deprivation, housing conditions, access to healthcare and education, labor vulnerability, and regional inequality. Its conclusions regarding the Azores are both encouraging and deeply alarming.
According to the report, the Azores registered the second-highest poverty rate in Portugal at 17.3%, surpassed only by the Alentejo region at 17.9%. The national average stood at 15.4%.
Yet paradoxically, the Azores also recorded the country’s largest reduction in poverty compared with the previous year — a drop of 6.9 percentage points.
The contrast captures the central paradox now defining the archipelago: progress exists, but structural vulnerability remains deeply embedded.
One of the study’s most revealing findings concerns the overwhelming role social transfers continue to play in preventing even more severe poverty across the islands.
Without social transfers — excluding pensions — the poverty rate in the Azores would be more than eight percentage points higher.
In practical terms, this means that a significant portion of social stability within the archipelago still depends heavily upon public redistribution mechanisms rather than autonomous economic resilience alone.
The report also examined regional poverty thresholds adjusted to local economic realities. While the national poverty threshold stood at €8,679 annually, the Azorean threshold was slightly lower at €8,311.
Even under that adjusted regional calculation, however, the poverty rate in the Azores remained high at 15.7%, compared to 16.6% using the national threshold.
Yet poverty alone does not fully explain the depth of the problem.
The Azores also emerged as the Portuguese region with the highest income inequality, measured through the Gini coefficient — surpassing even Grande Lisboa.
Before social transfers, the regional Gini coefficient stood at 36.4%; after redistribution measures, it fell to 33.8%. Even here, the importance of social support mechanisms becomes evident: inequality decreases significantly only because of state intervention.
Perhaps most strikingly, the municipality of Vila do Porto on Santa Maria Island ranked as the third most unequal locality in Portugal, with a Gini coefficient of 47.7%.
The report’s analysis of material and social deprivation paints an even more unsettling portrait.
The Azores recorded the highest rates of material and social deprivation in the country at 17.4%, while severe deprivation reached 8.2% — nearly double the national average of 4.3%.
In simple terms, nearly one in every five Azoreans was living under conditions of material or social deprivation in 2024.
The data surrounding housing conditions are particularly severe.
The Azores registered some of Portugal’s highest levels of housing-related hardship:
- 27.1% considered housing costs excessively burdensome.
- 22.9% lacked the financial ability to adequately heat their homes.
- 33.1% could not keep their homes comfortably cool during summer.
- Nearly half of families — 48% — lived in homes with leaking roofs, damp walls, deteriorated windows, or rotting floors.
These are not peripheral statistics. They reveal structural deficiencies affecting daily life across the islands.
Healthcare indicators also raised concerns.
The Azores recorded the highest level in Portugal of deprivation regarding access to non-dental medical consultations or treatment at 6.7%. Additionally, 33.3% of residents reported limitations in daily activities due to health problems.
Food insecurity likewise appeared more acute in the autonomous regions.
In the Azores:
- 6.9% could not afford a protein-based meal every two days.
- 13.4% reported being unable to purchase sufficient food to prepare healthy and complete meals — the highest rate in Portugal.
The report therefore forces a difficult but necessary conversation about the future of the Azores.
For decades, the islands have balanced two competing realities: on one hand, extraordinary natural beauty, strategic Atlantic relevance, and increasing tourism visibility; on the other, persistent structural poverty, low wages, fragile housing conditions, and dependence upon public-sector redistribution.
The danger lies not merely in poverty itself, but in normalization.
Because islands possess strong communal identities, hardship often becomes socially absorbed, culturally endured, and politically softened beneath narratives of resilience and solidarity. Yet resilience alone cannot replace structural transformation.
The Atlantic postcard image of the Azores — whales, vineyards, lagoons, volcanic landscapes, sustainability awards, and tourism campaigns — exists alongside homes with humidity, families struggling to heat their homes, and communities dependent on transfers simply to remain economically afloat.
The report does not deny progress. In fact, it documents important reductions in poverty and highlights the mitigating impact of social policy. But it also exposes how fragile that progress remains.
The central challenge for the next decades may therefore be whether the Azores can convert visibility into equity — transforming economic growth, tourism expansion, technological modernization, and geopolitical relevance into materially improved living conditions across all islands and social classes.
Because in the end, the success of an autonomous region cannot be measured only by airports, strategic bases, tourism statistics, or sustainability branding.
It must also be measured by whether ordinary people can live with dignity inside the islands they call home.
Translated and adapted from a story in Correio dos Açores-Natalino Viveiros, director
Novidades - The Islands and the Diaspora 