Portugal in the Global Peace Index 2026: 7th of 163, and What the Ranking Does Not Measure

What the Global Peace Index counts

The index covers 163 states and territories, 99.7% of the world’s population, with 23 indicators in three domains: Societal Safety and Security (11 indicators), Ongoing Domestic and International Conflict (6) and Militarisation (6). Each indicator is scaled from 1 to 5 and a lower score means a more peaceful country. IEP weights internal peacefulness at 60% and external peacefulness at 40%. We could not read the appendix that sets weights for each domain and indicator, so we do not state them.

The safety domain includes perceptions of criminality, the homicide rate, the level of violent crime, the impact of terrorism, violent demonstrations, political instability, the Political Terror Scale, incarceration and police rates, access to small arms and the number of refugees and displaced people. The qualitative indicators, five in number, are scored by analysts at the Economist Intelligence Unit rather than taken from a statistic. Militarisation covers military spending as a share of GDP, armed forces per capita, arms imports and exports, funding of UN peacekeeping, and nuclear and heavy weapons capability. Ongoing Conflict is mostly about wars.

The 2026 edition found the average level of peacefulness 0.7% worse than a year earlier, the twelfth consecutive deterioration. IEP counts 61 active state-based conflicts, the most since the Second World War, and puts Russia last for the first time at 3.367. Iceland is first for the nineteenth year. Western and Central Europe remains the most peaceful region, with seven of the top ten, although 22 of its 33 countries deteriorated. IEP says 99 countries deteriorated and 62 improved. Those add to 161, and the report does not explain the two missing.

Eleven editions in the top ten, and a rank that stopped moving

Portugal ranked 14th in the 2009 edition and 18th in both 2013 and 2014. It rose to 11th in 2015, 5th in 2016 and 3rd in 2017. Home Affairs Minister Eduardo Cabrita told ECO News in 2019 that six years earlier Portugal had been 18th and was now 3rd, which matches the printed ranks. Portugal was 3rd again in 2019 and 2020, when its printed score of 1.247 was the best on record, and then slid: 4th in 2021, 6th in 2022 and 7th in every edition since 2023.

Three things in this series are routinely misreported. Portugal was 3rd, not 2nd, in 2017, a claim still on a property-advice site. It first entered the top ten in 2016, not 2015, when IEP placed it 11th. And it has not been in the top five since 2021, so “top five since 2016” is also wrong. Our corrections panel below sets out each claim and the version the sources support.

The scores in the series above are as printed in each year’s report. IEP revises earlier years when it adds data and, in 2026, appears to have changed its scale. Iceland’s printed score moved from 1.095 in the 2025 edition to 1.161 in 2026, yet IEP reports that Iceland improved by 2% over the year. We therefore treat the rank as the main series and score differences between editions as unreliable.

Retains, or up one place?

AICEP’s two June articles tell different stories. The first, dated 12 June, says Portugal ranks 7th, up one place from the previous edition. The second, dated 15 June, is headed “retains spot” and says Portugal has held 7th place since 2023. Both are defensible. On the ranks printed in the 2023 to 2026 editions, Portugal was 7th four times running. IEP’s own comparison, though, re-ranks the previous year on the current method. The 2026 poster shows Portugal with a change of up one place, and the regional table shows a score change of -0.020, which implies a revised 2025 score of 1.447 (derived) and a revised 2025 rank of 8th. The score printed in the 2025 edition was 1.371.

The same rebasing affects every country. France is 99th in 2026 and IEP shows it up three places, which implies a revised 2025 rank of 102nd (derived), while the 2025 edition printed it 74th. Spain’s printed rank went from 25th to 27th, yet IEP shows it up four places. Germany’s went from 20th to 28th, and IEP shows it down five. A reader comparing the two printed tables would conclude that France fell 25 places in a year. On IEP’s own like-for-like basis it rose three.

Within IEP’s Western and Central Europe grouping Portugal is 6th, behind Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Ireland and Austria. Spain, Portugal’s only land neighbour and its largest source market by arrivals, is 27th, 20 places lower. Without the indicator file we cannot say which indicators account for the gap, and the table should not be read as a ranking of how safe the two countries feel to a visitor.

Against Portugal’s tourism competitors the order is wide. Croatia is 23rd, Spain 27th, Italy 35th, Greece 53rd and France 99th. Our Portugal versus Greece comparison found Greece well ahead on nights and arrivals, which shows how little a peace rank says about demand: the country 46 places lower on this index is the larger tourism economy.

What puts Portugal below Iceland

The indicator scores for Portugal sit in a licensed IEP data file that we could not open, so we cannot rank its 23 indicators. Earlier editions give partial answers. In 2024, IEP’s report put Portugal 2nd in the world on militarisation, with a domain score of 1.224. AICEP’s article on that edition gave the other two domain scores as 1.561 for safety and security and 1.181 for conflict. We could not confirm those two in IEP’s PDF. On those figures, safety and security was Portugal’s weakest domain, which is the one a visitor would care about.

IEP credited Portugal’s 2025 improvement to better perceptions of criminality and greater political stability. Its explanation for Iceland’s lead in 2026 is no standing military, very low crime and strong social cohesion. The gap to Iceland is 0.266 on the 2026 scale (derived), against 0.276 in the 2025 edition. The 2017 report named weapons imports as Portugal’s main negative contributor in that year. IEP also reports that European NATO allies raised defence spending by about 20% in 2025 and that Europe’s militarisation trend has reversed sharply since 2022. Portugal’s 2026 militarisation result is a data gap.

The point for a traveller is simple. A large part of the ranking rests on indicators about armies, arms trade and wars. Of the 23 indicators, only a handful touch anything a tourist feels on the street, and each of those is a national statistic about residents.

What the index leaves out

IEP defines the index as measuring the absence of violence or fear of violence. The text of the 2026 report contains no reference to tourism, tourists, travel or visitors. The risks a visitor to Portugal is most likely to meet are small thefts and accidents, and none has an indicator. The table sets each against the nearest figure we could source.

The crime a visitor meets

The Annual Internal Security Report (RASI) for 2025, delivered to parliament on 31 March 2026, recorded 365,802 offences. General crime was up 3.1%, and press reports tie much of that rise to road offences and more enforcement. Violent and serious crime was 14,149 offences, down 1.6% and about 4% of the total. Homicides were 98, nine more than in 2024, which implies 89 in 2024 (derived). A copy of the Lusa wire on DNoticias says general crime rose 31.1%. The Government communiqué, DN and RTP say 3.1%, and we use that.

Recorded crime measures reporting as much as offending. A rise in pickpocket counts can mean more thefts, more tourists, more willingness to report or a police team that takes complaints more readily. RASI itself attributes much of the 2025 rise in general crime to road offences and to enforcement activity, a reminder that police-recorded totals move with police effort. Domestic violence reports, 29,644 in 2025, fell 1.9%, and DNoticias headlined that rape, sexual extortion and homicide were the violent crimes that rose most. A peace index reads the homicide rate and an analyst’s view of violent crime and nothing finer.

Eurostat’s police-recorded series shows what the peace rank hides. Portugal’s robbery rate in 2024 was 88.37 per 100,000 inhabitants, 1.8 times Italy’s 49.77 and 3.2 times Greece’s 27.89, and below Spain’s 129.53 (derived ratios). Portugal’s own rate fell from 106.32 in 2019 to a low of 76.65 in 2021 and has risen since. Its homicide rate of 0.68 is close to Spain’s 0.72 and above Italy’s 0.57. Gallup’s 2025 Global Safety Report, with fieldwork in 2024, has 78% of Portuguese adults feeling safe walking alone at night, against 81% in Spain, 64% in Greece and 60% in Italy. The comparison table below puts these beside the peace and tourism ranks.

Pickpocketing is the crime tourists report most and the one the index ignores. RASI recorded 7,443 pickpocket thefts in 2025, 533 more than in 2024 (derived 6,910). Lisbon district accounted for 46%, Porto district 26%, Faro 7% and Setúbal 5%. The monthly peaks were July (676) and December (670), and RASI links the crime to tourist flows and large events in historic areas. The PSP counted 2,867 complaints from January to May 2026, up 7%, while arrests fell from 69 to 56 (Observador, 16 June 2026). Lisbon’s Tram 28 corridor is the textbook case. The GNR reports theft from vehicles down 7.6% in 2025, with arrests up from 26 to 68, and links it to beach car parks, shopping centres and palaces in the season.

Official advisories say the same. The US State Department rates Portugal Level 1, “exercise normal precautions”, as of 23 December 2025, and warns of petty theft in crowded tourist areas. The UK Foreign Office tells travellers to be alert to street crime and to take care on public transport and at crowded bus and tram stops. Canada says pickpocketing and bag snatching are common in Lisbon and Porto and that thieves target rental cars with foreign plates and rental stickers. No agency publishes a count of tourist victims. RASI coverage mentions none, and neither do the GNR or PSP items we found.

The risks no peace index counts

Road deaths run above the European norm. Preliminary European Commission data reported by RTP give Portugal 55 deaths per million inhabitants in 2025 and 58 in 2024, against an EU average of 45. Drowning is a larger summer risk than most visitors assume. Renascença reports 142 drowning deaths in 2025, up 17.4%, and 75 in the first half of 2026, but we could not establish whether the series belongs to the maritime authority or to a lifeguard body. The maritime authority’s own beach count for 1 May to 31 August 2025 was 16 deaths, with about 350 km of unwatched coast. Rip tides are the UK advisory’s main warning for beaches.

Fire is the largest physical hazard. ICNF’s provisional report to 15 October 2025 counted 269,085 hectares burned, and later press totals run to about 271,000, with fire deaths given as four or six depending on the source. Our wildfires and tourism analysis found that nights kept rising through the 2024 and 2025 fires. Heat is a further risk. The Directorate-General of Health reported 284 excess deaths in the heat alert from 28 June to early July 2025, more than 70% of them aged 85 and over, so the burden fell on residents.

Infrastructure failures sit outside any peace index. The Glória funicular derailed in Lisbon on 3 September 2025, killing 16 people, most of them foreign tourists according to DN, with a final technical report not expected before the end of the first quarter of 2027. The Iberian blackout of 28 April 2025 was classed by ENTSO-E as a grade-3 incident and the most significant in the European power system in over two decades. A general strike on 11 December 2025 led, by one union’s count, to about 400 flight cancellations. Border waits under the new entry system are covered in our EES and border queues analysis. An IPMA tsunami exercise in October 2025 simulated a magnitude 8.5 earthquake off Cabo de São Vicente, with a first wave at Sagres after about 50 minutes. We found no published probability for such an event.

Does a peace ranking bring visitors?

The evidence supports a narrower claim than the headlines make. Kollias and Papadamou, using the Global Peace Index for 113 countries from 2008 to 2014, found that in developed countries a worsening in peacefulness had only a short-lived negative effect on tourism. A systematic review by Krajňák of 45 studies on terrorism and tourism demand finds that terrorism generally reduces demand, with results that vary by context. Neither shows that a higher place on a peace league table raises arrivals. Portugal’s realised terrorism score is already low: 84th of 163 in the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, on 0.423.

Stated preference is stronger. Turismo de Portugal’s third visitor-sentiment survey, with fieldwork in May 2026 and about 6,680 travellers in ten source markets, found safety the most-cited factor when choosing a Southern European destination, at 16%, ahead of affordable prices and local hospitality at 15% each. The survey gives no Portugal-specific safety figure. A 2018 NOVA University of Lisbon survey of 806 tourists in Lisbon, Porto, Faro and Sintra found 98% felt safe. Safety matters to choosers. Nothing we found shows that the difference between 3rd and 7th on a national peace index registers with them.

The demand data do not move with the rank. Nights in tourist accommodation grew 1.3% in the first half of 2026 to 36.8 million, with the rank unchanged. Non-resident nights fell 0.6% in June, the first fall in eight months, and rose 1.9% in the August flash estimate (INE via Observador and ECO). Our monthly tourism tracker follows these releases. Portugal’s rank in the WEF tourism index, 11th of 110, includes a safety pillar that draws on five indicators, among them IEP’s Global Terrorism Index, confidence in the police and night-time safety. That pillar is not independent of IEP’s own products, and we could not obtain Portugal’s pillar score.

How the ranking has been reported shows where the “safest” label comes from. Government and English-language outlets lean towards it, and Portuguese-language trade outlets lean towards “peaceful”. In 2019 and 2021 the Ministry of Internal Administration tied the rank to attracting tourists. AICEP did the same in 2026.

A measure a visitor could use would need three things that do not exist today. The first is a victim series that records residence or nationality, so that tourists can be counted as victims of theft, robbery and assault. RASI records offences and districts but, in the coverage we found, not who was robbed. The second is a place series for the hot spots: the PSP knows how many complaints come from the Baixa, Alfama and the tram lines, and we found no published split. The third is a published safety result from Turismo de Portugal’s visitor surveys, because the sentiment study reports safety as a reason for choosing Southern Europe without a Portugal figure. Until those exist the Global Peace Index will keep being quoted for a question it was not built to answer.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Portugal is a low-violence country with a steady petty-theft problem in a few places. Keep phones and wallets out of back pockets on Baixa, Alfama and tram routes, especially in July and December, when RASI’s monthly counts peak. Leave nothing visible in a rental car, since Canadian and Australian advisories say thieves target rental stickers and foreign plates. At the coast, swim where lifeguards are posted, as roughly 350 km of beach has none. On the road, drive as you would in a country with a fatality rate above the EU average. Our Lisbon travel guide covers the neighbourhoods where each of these applies.

Tourism businesses and investors. Do not market Portugal as the “7th safest country”. Use “7th most peaceful of 163 countries in the Global Peace Index 2026”, name IEP and give the date, because the safety label invites the pickpocketing comparison and loses it. The rank is not a demand driver on the evidence we found, and three things would test that: a move outside the top ten, which would still say little about visitors; a rise in the Global Terrorism Index score from 0.423, which would matter; and a published tourist-victim series, which would let a hotel or insurer price the risk instead of guessing. Underwriters should look at the RASI pickpocketing series, which rose 7.7% in 2025, and at the road and water figures, before the peace index.

Journalists and analysts. The citable figures are these: Portugal 7th of 163 on 1.427, IEP, released 5 June 2026; Iceland 1.161; 7th in the printed 2023 to 2026 editions; top ten in 11 consecutive editions from 2016; 3rd in 2017, 2019 and 2020. RASI 2025 gives 365,802 offences, 14,149 violent and serious, 98 homicides and 7,443 pickpocket thefts. Eurostat gives robbery of 88.37 per 100,000 in 2024. Do not repeat that Portugal is “the 7th safest country”, that it was 2nd in 2017, that it entered the top ten in 2015, or that the AICEP page headed “7th European country in the WEF tourism index” is about tourism. Do not compare printed scores or ranks between editions. For the series, this article adds a case where an official headline relabels the index it cites, and a data gap: Portugal publishes no count of crimes against tourists.