"Lisboom!" Is the expression with which media and institutions describe the economic recovery in Portugal after the 2008 crisis. A recovery based mainly on tourism and the real estate market, thanks to political choices aimed at attracting financial investments to "raise the country". It is within this framework that the city of Lisbon has undergone devastating transformations in recent years. The annual number of international tourists went from 6.8 million in 2010 to almost 16.5 million in 2019, and extra-European investments in the real estate market in the last 6 years amounted to almost 5 billion euros.

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This real estate speculation has had profound and dramatic effects for thousands of people, on what was already a fragile urban and social balance. A city in which hypermodern and anonymous buildings have gradually, but inexorably, replaced entire buildings and neighbourhoods. In the midst of all this, numerous families and lonely people have been evicted or live in a condition of perennial threat from the owners, who in many cases are international investment groups.

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To complete this bleak picture, the "discovery" that most of the new buildings remained empty. Like a newly built residence with a swimming pool in the heart of Mouraria, a former working-class neighbourhood now colonised by seemingly unstoppable flows of money.

As required by the financial logic of the new millennium, in fact, real estate investments no longer follow the only economic law of supply and demand, but are used by large groups to secure large sums of money.

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While the city is emptied, however, a humanity made up of associations, informal groups and individual citizens does not give up, trying to reverse a tendency that is only apparently ungovernable, which is instead the result of political choices and  precise responsibilities.