Short answer: yes. Taking photographs in public places in Portugal is legal, and you do not need anyone's permission to press the shutter on a street, a square or a beach. What the law regulates is not the taking of the picture but what you do with it afterwards – showing it, publishing it, selling it – and there the rules are specific and worth knowing. As a photographer working in Lisbon I get asked this constantly, usually by travellers who want to shoot the city without getting into trouble. Here is how it actually works.
What the law says: Article 79 of the Civil Code
The rule that matters is Article 79 of the Portuguese Civil Code, titled direito à imagem – the right to one's image. It has three parts, and each one answers a question photographers ask.
1. A person's portrait needs their consent to be shown or sold
The first paragraph is the default: a person's portrait cannot be exhibited, reproduced or put on sale without that person's consent. Note the word portrait – the law is about images in which a recognisable person is the subject. This is the paragraph that catches the close-up of a stranger's face you were hoping to print, post or sell.
2. No consent is needed when the person is part of a public scene
The second paragraph lists the exceptions, and one of them is the whole legal basis of street photography. Consent is not required when the image is framed within a public place, or within events of public interest, or events that took place publicly. It is also not required for people who are well known, for people acting in a public office, for police and judicial needs, and for scientific, educational or cultural purposes.
In practice: a wide shot of Rua Augusta at rush hour, a tram climbing through Alfama with passengers at the windows, a crowd at a festival – these are images of a place in which people happen to appear, and they are fine to publish. A tight portrait of one commuter, isolated from the scene, is a different thing: the place has become background and the person has become the subject, and paragraph 1 applies again.
3. Never if it damages the person's honour or reputation
The third paragraph overrides the other two. Even where consent would not otherwise be needed, a portrait cannot be reproduced, exhibited or sold if doing so harms the honour, reputation or simple decency of the person shown. Someone caught in an embarrassing moment, someone visibly distressed, someone photographed in a way that invites ridicule – the public-place exception does not cover that.
Taking versus publishing: the distinction that matters
Everything above is about what happens after the photograph exists. That is why the short answer is yes. You can walk through Lisbon photographing whatever is in front of you; the question of consent arrives at the moment you decide to show the picture to anyone. Keeping a portrait in your archive is not an issue. Posting it is where Article 79 starts to apply.
Two further points sit alongside the Civil Code. Photographing someone inside a private space from the street – through a window, into a courtyard – is not street photography, and the reasonable expectation of privacy that applies there is real. And if you publish identifiable people for a commercial purpose, European data-protection rules can apply on top of Article 79; for advertising or stock use, a signed model release from each recognisable person is the standard way to stay clear of both.
How this plays out on the street
Photograph the scene, and let people be part of it
Most of what makes Lisbon worth shooting is the scene anyway: the light on a tiled façade, a tram, a market, the geometry of a staircase with someone halfway up it. When people are one element of a composition rather than its whole point, you are squarely inside the exception in paragraph 2, and you are also making better pictures.
For a real portrait, ask
When you do want the face – the fishmonger, the old man on the bench, the kid with the football – ask. A sentence about what you are doing and a genuine smile gets a yes far more often than people expect, and it turns a stolen frame into a portrait the person actually wanted to give you. If the answer is no, that is the answer.
Read the room
Someone who covers their face, turns away, or asks you to stop has told you everything you need to know. Legality is the floor, not the standard. You are a guest in someone else's city, and the people in it did not sign up to be your subject.
How I work
My own work in Lisbon is planned portrait sessions – men's, women's and couples – where consent is not a legal question but the whole premise: the person in front of the camera is there because they want the pictures. But the same instinct carries over to the candid frames I take between sessions. Knowing Article 79 keeps you out of trouble; paying attention to the person keeps you honest, and it is what makes the picture worth taking in the first place.
This article explains the general rule as it stands in the Portuguese Civil Code; it is not legal advice for a specific situation. If you are publishing commercially, or in doubt about a particular image, ask a Portuguese lawyer.