Portugal Attracts Record 24 Million Tourists in 2019
Portugal managed to again beat all past records for tourist numbers in the first half of 2019 according to the latest statistics issued by the Portuguese tourist board Turismo de Portugal from national statistics.
And according to the President of Turismo de Portugal, Luís Araújo, the record is set to maintain for the rest of the year.
In an interview with Jornal Económico, he said that by the end of the first half of 2019 tourism revenues were up 6% like-for-like while the number of tourists had grown 7% on the same period last year.
Araújo said he believed that it was possible to maintain the level of growth until the end of this year while admitting that “we are in a slowdown phase” since it would not be possible to repeat the increase in accumulated revenues of 45% seen in Portugal over the past three years.
Since 2010, when tourism was worth nearly €8Bn, Portugal has enjoyed an unprecedented boom in tourism which stood at over €12Bn in 2016, €15Bn in 2017 and €17Bn in 2018.
According to forecasts from Turismo de Portugal, Portugal should break its record of 24 million tourists by the end of the current year given that in 2018, according to statistics released by the National Statistics Institute, it welcomed a total of 22.8 million tourists, which placed Portugal in 17th position in the ranking of the countries worldwide which received the greatest number of tourists according to the WTO.