The short answer is yes, and we have been doing it for years. The longer answer is that it depends almost entirely on decisions you make before you move, and most of the people who struggle made a different one about the property.
Internet is the whole question
Everything else is solvable. This isn’t.
Rural Portugal is not uniformly connected. There are properties with fibre and properties where you will be fighting a marginal mobile signal from a hilltop, and they can be a few kilometres apart. If you are buying somewhere with the intention of earning from it, the connection is not a detail to check after the offer — it is the first thing to establish, before you fall in love with the view.
Ours is high-speed and reliable, and has been the backbone of the business every working day for years. That is not luck; it is why we bought this particular place.
Time zones work in your favour
Portugal runs on the same clock as the UK and an hour behind most of western Europe. If your clients are British or Irish, you are simply working normal hours. If they are Dutch, German or French, you get a quiet hour at the start of every day before anyone needs you.
Compare that to the people trying to run European client work from Southeast Asia or the Caribbean, and it is not close.
What actually gets harder
Banking and admin. Portuguese bureaucracy is real and slow. You will need a fiscal number, a local bank account and patience. It is all navigable, but nothing happens in an afternoon.
Tax. Where your business is registered, where you are tax-resident and where your clients are can be three different answers, and getting the structure right matters. Take proper advice before you move, not after. This is genuinely the part people get wrong.
Isolation, if you let it happen. Working alone in a beautiful place is wonderful for about four months. After that you need a reason to see people. Everyone we know who has made this work has built some kind of routine that gets them off the property regularly.
What gets much easier
The cost base. A business that produces a modest monthly income in British terms produces a genuinely comfortable life here. That is the whole arbitrage, and it is why so many people are trying to make some version of this work.
And the interruptions stop. No commute, no office, no one dropping by your desk. The work compresses into the part of the day it actually needs, and the rest belongs to you.
The honest caveat
A business you can run from anywhere is not the same as a business that runs itself. Ours takes a modest and predictable slice of the week — because it was deliberately built that way over fifteen years, and rebuilt recently around systems that handle the repetitive parts automatically.
Starting from scratch, from a smallholding, with no client base, is a much harder proposition than it looks from the outside. Arriving with something already established is a different thing entirely.