The first time the town shut for lunch we stood in the square feeling like people who had failed to read the instructions.
We had driven in for one thing. It was half past twelve. Everything — the shops, the offices, the counter we needed — closed, and stayed closed, for two hours. Not a token half hour with somebody left on the till. Actually shut, because the people who worked there had gone home to eat.
We were annoyed. It took us about a year to work out that we were the ones who had it wrong.
The test
There is a simple way to tell whether a society organises itself around people or around commerce: does it ever accept real inconvenience to business in order to protect something human?
Almost everywhere, the answer is no. Convenience wins. Shops open longer, delivery gets faster, somebody answers the phone at ten at night, and the cost of that is quietly paid by whoever is behind the counter or driving the van.
By that test, the EU is close to the last place standing. Not because Europeans are better people — but because the rules are written the other way round, and have been for decades.
What that looks like in practice
The lunch. Two hours, most days, in most small towns. It is genuinely inconvenient. It is also the reason that families eat together on a Tuesday, and that the man who fixes your car has a life.
A legal right to be left alone. Portugal passed a law in 2021 making it an offence for an employer to contact staff outside their working hours. Not a wellbeing policy or a guideline — an actual penalty. Somewhere, somebody decided that your evening belongs to you, and then wrote it down.
Holiday you actually get. EU law sets a floor of four weeks’ paid annual leave for everyone. Portugal goes further. It is not a perk you negotiate; it is a thing you are owed.
Healthcare that is not attached to your job. You do not stay in a role you have outgrown because of what leaving would do to your family’s cover. For anyone arriving from a system where that calculation is normal, this takes a while to stop feeling like a trick.
Two years of guarantee on anything you buy. Across the EU, goods carry a minimum two-year legal guarantee. It is bad for manufacturers, which is precisely why it is a good example.
Your data belongs to you. Whatever you think of the cookie banners, the underlying principle of GDPR is that information about a person is that person’s, not a company’s asset to trade.
Food you can trust without reading the label twice. Standards are stricter, supply chains are shorter, and the market on a Saturday is full of things that were in the ground on Thursday.
Every single one of those is a cost to somebody’s business. That is the point. That is the whole point.
The other side of it
It would be dishonest to write this without the flip side, because they come from the same root.
A society that writes rules to protect people writes a great many rules. The bureaucracy here is real and it is slow. You will stand in queues. You will be sent away for a document you did not know existed and then sent away again for a translation of it. Things that should take an afternoon take a fortnight.
You cannot have the protections without the paperwork. They are the same instinct wearing different clothes. Some days that is genuinely maddening, and we would rather tell you now than have you discover it at a counter in Sertã.
Why it matters if you are thinking about this
If you are reading this from Britain, you are outside all of it now, and you will feel the difference from the first week.
But the deeper thing is not the list. It is what the list adds up to: a working assumption, built into the law and into the day, that a person’s time is theirs. That there are hours nobody may buy. That the shop shutting at lunch is not a failure of service — it is a society keeping a promise to the people who work in it.
Which, when you have spent a career somewhere that assumes the opposite, turns out to be the thing you notice most. Not the weather. Not the cost of tomatoes.
That the day is allowed to belong to you.