EU Warns Portugal: Paper Stamps May Return If Lisbon Queues Persist

Visitors landing in Lisbon this month have discovered that the promise of faster, fully digital border checks has collided with reality. Non-EU travellers queued for more than an hour and a half, tempers frayed, and airlines scrambled to rebook missed connections. Brussels has now reminded Portugal that the new technology was built with an emergency escape hatch: officials can temporarily flip back to the old paper-stamp routine whenever long backlogs threaten to paralyse an airport.

Why the late-autumn queues matter in Portugal

For a country that relies on tourism for roughly 15 % of GDP, snarled passport lines translate directly into lost hotel nights, higher compensation bills for carriers and bruised national image. Humberto Delgado Airport, Portugal’s main gateway, handled more than 7.6 M passengers in the first quarter of 2025, and most forecasts pointed to record holiday traffic over Christmas. Any hint of chronic delays risks nudging airlines to funnel long-haul traffic through Madrid or Paris instead of Lisbon, a scenario that worries hotel associations from the Algarve to Porto.

Brussels’ fallback clause, explained

European Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert confirmed this week that the new Entry/Exit System (EES) includes “the possibility of reverting” to traditional checks. The six-month transition window, running until April 2026, gives every Schengen state legal cover to press pause if the biometric gates fail or manpower proves insufficient. Commission officials stress that the override should be a last resort, but they also underline that the software is still learning to cope with peak flows, especially in airports that were already stretched before the switch-over.

Lisbon’s baptism of fire

Portugal activated EES on 12 October with a limited number of automated kiosks and a PSP shift roster that unions say was drafted for pre-pandemic volumes. Within 48 hours, wait times at arrivals topped 90 minutes, some machines crashed, and ground staff reverted to stamping passports by hand to keep the line moving. The Commission nevertheless hailed the continental rollout as a success – over 100 000 traveller profiles were captured across Schengen in the first two days – while conceding that Lisbon suffered “teething issues”.

What the authorities are doing

The Ministry of Infrastructure has ordered more biometric gates, extra servers and an additional PSP shift for December. ANA – the airport operator – installed real-time queue monitors and urged passengers on non-Schengen flights to arrive earlier. AIMA, the new migration agency, has deployed mobile enrolment teams so that frequent business visitors can pre-register fingerprints and facial images before flying. Behind the scenes, airlines are lobbying for priority lanes for tight connections, arguing that missed trans-Atlantic links cost them far more than the hardware upgrades would.

Will Portugal pull the emergency brake?

Experts doubt a wholesale return to ink stamps will happen. Manual processing is slower, less secure and undermines the €1.3 B that EU states have invested in the system. Cyber-security advisers also warn that once a country reverts, synchronising the old and new databases becomes a nightmare. The likelier scenario, say union leaders, is a hybrid model during peaks: biometric gates for repeat visitors whose data are already on file, and human officers for first-timers.

Longer-term outlook for travellers

From spring 2026 onward, Brussels expects EES to shave several minutes off each inspection, track overstays automatically and make forged passport stamps obsolete. For Portuguese residents who host relatives from Brazil, the United States or Angola, the upgrade should eventually mean shorter queues and fewer unexpected detours to the secondary inspection room. The next four months, however, will test whether the hardware arrives in time — or whether Portugal will have to dust off its rubber stamps a little longer.