You came for citizenship. Then discovered a divorce needs "recognising".
This is almost always how it begins: mid-way through the citizenship process — yours or your children's — the Portuguese civil record requires your marital status to be correct. If there was a divorce abroad, it must hold here first. That step has a name: foreign judgment recognition. It is exactly — and only — what we do.
Citizenship requires the marriage to be registered at the consulate or Civil Registry.
The marriage registration requires the divorce to be annotated.
The divorce annotation requires the foreign judgment to be recognised.
Citizenship is not our product. It is the reason recognition just entered your life.
Like the monarch that never made the whole crossing, the right travels across generations. The parent settles one stretch; the child or grandchild completes the path.
Recognising the judgment today opens the door that those who come after will walk through — inherited citizenship, the correct marital status, the lineage in order on both sides.
See the generational crossing →
It came from China. It became the name of Portugal.
Portuguese ships carried it west — and across half the world, from Istanbul to Tehran, the word for “orange” is still a form of “Portugal”: portakal, burtuqal, portokali. No one asks where it came from anymore.
That is what recognition is: what crossed over comes to hold here — without ceasing to be what it was.
And whatever else the path requires — marriage transcription, certified translations, the administrative citizenship of those who inherit the right — is folded into the same recognition engagement, when it makes sense. Not as separate services: as parts of the same path.
You can. But the Portuguese civil record must reflect your real marital status — and if the divorce was decided abroad, it only holds here once recognised by the Court of Appeal.
Because the foreign marriage and divorce must appear correctly in the Portuguese record before citizenship. Recognition is the step that makes the divorce valid in Portugal.
Our service is judgment recognition — the step that unlocks citizenship. When it makes sense, the administrative citizenship of those who inherit the right is folded into the same engagement, never as a standalone product.
The age of the judgment doesn't matter. What matters is that it doesn't yet hold in Portugal. The assessment tells you exactly what your case needs.