We lived in Spain for years and ran a bar there, so we know exactly what full equality feels like — it’s the water you swim in. We’re moving to Panama anyway. The only comparison in this series written entirely from experience, including the two things about Spain we don’t miss.
Portugal’s D7 lets a married couple qualify on about €1,380 a month — the gentlest bar in Europe. What the listicles skip: the retiree tax loophole is closed, Lisbon housing shocks arriving Americans, and every family emergency is a transatlantic production. We’re Europhiles who chose the three-hour flight instead.
Colombia wins the spreadsheet — marriage equality, a ~$1,400 pension visa your partner rides on, Medellín’s eternal spring. Then come the two asterisks the paradise articles skip: a documented dating-app crime problem, and worldwide taxation with no U.S. treaty. Here’s the whole picture.
Same $1,000 pension requirement, shared border, opposite legal worlds: in Costa Rica that one pension covers you both, because your marriage is real there. In Panama it’s $1,000 each. If only one of you qualifies, this comparison is over before the grocery prices — here’s the rest of it if you both do.
Mexico has the best gay life in the hemisphere and a residency bar that just quadrupled past Panama’s — about $4,400 a month or $74,000 in savings, with fees that doubled in January. Here’s the head-to-head between the scene and the wallet, from a couple who chose the wallet.