The number of births registered last year in the Algarve’s hospitals has led to a welcome reversal the downward trend that started in 2010.
There were 4,083 babies born in the Algarve last year, 314 more than in the year before.
The 7.8% increase is good but the number is far from that achieved 50 years ago at a time when despite a much lower population, there were around 5,200 born annually.
There was a higher death rate back then of course but the era of big happy families seems to be over as young couple struggle with high property prices, low wages and high utility prices relative to income.
This mini-boom is good news as the Algarve, like the rest of Portugal, was heading for a long slow motion death with fewer and fewer children and an increasing number of pensioners.
The big boom in the early 2000s were linked to high economic activity bringing foreigner workers to Portugal. These workers as a have proved most fertile but when they left at the start of the recession, the number of babies born in the Algarve declined sharply.
Portugal joins Italy, Greece and Germany for having the lowest birth rates in the EU. The rate in Portugal as at the end of 2014 was 7.9%, the lowest in the EU. In 40 years Portugal has managed to go from the most fecund country in Europe to the one with the lowest birth rate.
Only 20 years ago in Portugal, only one in five babies were born outside of marriage: these days it is one in two with the Alentejo and the Algarve leading a trend in unmarried mothers.
