I am the grandchild of a Portuguese citizen

What this case is

This is the second-degree descent route: the grandchild of a Portuguese citizen asks for nationality to be recognised on the basis of that tie. It is a legal basis distinct from the one for children, with its own queue in practically every registry office that publishes dates.

The volume under this legal basis has grown considerably in recent years, and the dates published for it tend to move at a different pace from the other categories in the same office. Comparing “grandchild” with “child” in the same office rarely helps: they are two queues that do not compete with each other.

When the application is filed for a minor, some registry offices publish a separate line by age group. When that happens, the age reported in the form changes which queue is read.

What usually appears in the publication

In the emails, this legal basis is identified by the article and, depending on the office, with an indication of stage — review within the sector or decision — and sometimes of registration route. Each of those combinations is a queue with its own date on this site.

Not every office publishes this legal basis every month. When a month goes without a reading, the history shows the gap instead of repeating the previous value: repeating it would turn an absence of information into information.

How to read the date published for this case

The date a registry office publishes is the submission date of the applications the sector is working on in that reference month — it is not a completion date or a forecast of a decision. When the email says “second half of March 2024”, it is saying the sector has reached the applications submitted in that window.

The comparison this site makes is a subtraction between two dates: the date your application was submitted and the date published for the queue. The result is the distance between them, in months. If the published date has not yet reached yours, there is a gap still to cover; if it has passed, the queue is ahead of your submission. Neither of those two sentences says anything about what happened to a specific application.

Registry offices state that applications are reviewed in order of submission date, within the relevant sector, according to the legal basis invoked. That order is what makes the comparison useful at all — and it is also why picking the wrong queue ruins the result, even with the arithmetic done right.

Where this reading stops being valid

A queue describes a group; you are one case. Document requests, requests for clarification, formal opinions and checks take individual applications out of submission order, and none of that shows up in a queue publication. That is why this site never states that an application is under review, has been decided, or will be completed on a given date.

On top of that, the reference month of the email is already in the past by the time the message arrives, not every queue is published every month, and a redistribution of batches between services can make the published date move backwards. The site shows those gaps and reversals instead of smoothing them over with estimates.

To confirm the actual stage of an application — submitted, under review, awaiting decision or completed — consult the official information from the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (IRN).

Common mistakes when reading these dates

• Assuming the grandchild queue moves at the same pace as the child queue in the same office.
• Comparing one office's review date with another office's decision date.
• Reading a gap in the history as a stalled queue: with no publication that month, neither claim can be made.
• Forgetting that the published date carries the lag of the email itself — the reference month is already in the past when the message arrives.

Frequently asked questions