Mercadona’s Lisbon Debut Comes With 180 Store Positions and High-Paying Medical Jobs

Anyone who has spent time in Spain will recognise the green-and-yellow daisy that marks the entrances to Mercadona. Now the Iberian grocery giant is putting down its first roots inside Lisbon’s city limits, and the move is creating one of the better-paid recruitment drives currently on the Portuguese market.

A double opening in November

Mercadona confirmed that two supermarkets—one in Alta de Lisboa, the other in nearby Quinta do Lambert—are scheduled to welcome their first shoppers in November. The pair of stores will lift the chain’s footprint in Lisbon district to ten branches by year-end, cementing a north-to-south expansion that began when the retailer crossed the border from Spain in 2019.

180 new shop-floor posts (training paid from day one)

For newcomers to Portugal who are weighing service-sector work, the headline number is 180 fresh jobs split between cashier, shelf-stacking, bakery and maintenance roles. Contracts start on the first day of mandatory training, and the company says it will pick up the tab for accommodation, meals and travel during that period—an arrangement still rare in the country’s retail sector.

Why doctors are central to the plan

Alongside store hires, Mercadona is hunting full-time physicians to staff its in-house occupational-health network that supports roughly 6,000 employees nationwide. The retailer is advertising positions in Lisbon, Setúbal, Santarém and Leiria with permanent contracts that begin at €45,637 gross per year and rise to €69,280 as seniority grows. Put differently, take-home pay starts at about €3,800 a month—more than four times the national minimum wage, which climbed to €910 in January. The package also includes holiday and Christmas bonuses mandated by Portuguese law, a daily meal allowance and a performance bonus pegged to store targets.

The small print for medical applicants

Candidates must hold an integrated master’s degree in medicine, be registered with the Portuguese Medical Association and possess a driving licence; Mercadona covers mileage for the regular on-site visits its doctors make to warehouses and shops. Fluency in Spanish is treated as a plus—many colleagues on the other end of the phone will be calling from Galicia or Andalusia—but it is not compulsory. What is non-negotiable is full-time availability, because part of the job involves remote triage on a dedicated employee health line that runs throughout the working day.

How the offer compares on the Portuguese market

Private-sector physicians in Portugal often begin around €2,500 after tax, while public-hospital interns earn less. Mercadona’s starting figure therefore sits at the upper end of the scale, even before allowances are added. The retailer argues that the investment reduces sick days and staff turnover—a logic that mirrors programmes already in place at large multinationals such as Volkswagen Autoeuropa in Setúbal and Bosch in Braga.

What foreigners should know before applying

If you completed your medical degree outside the European Union, expect a licensing process that can stretch for several months and involves language testing in Portuguese. For supermarket floor jobs, applicants need only demonstrate legal residency and secondary-school Portuguese; neither prior retail experience nor Spanish is required. All applications are lodged online via the company’s careers portal, and interviews for the November openings are already under way.

A sign of fiercer competition in Lisbon’s grocery aisle

Mercadona’s arrival intensifies a price war that already features Lidl, Aldi, Continente and Pingo Doce. For expatriates who have struggled to find the broad Spanish product lines stocked by stores across the border—from Hacendado olive oil to the chain’s in-house vegan burgers—the November openings promise additional choice. For job-seekers with or without a medical degree, they also offer an above-average pay packet in a labour market where wages have stubbornly lagged inflation.