The director of the Portuguese Institute of the Orient (IPOR) told Lusa that the number of Portuguese tutorials provided by the institution has almost doubled this year, largely due to ‘gold visas’ and Chinese investment in Lusophone countries.

With more than three months to the end of the year the number of hours of Portuguese language learning tutorials has almost doubled when compared to 2018, exceeding half a thousand hours, Joaquim Coelho Ramos said in an interview.

“Only in the first two months of this economic year, we exceeded the number of tutorials from last year,” according to IPOR, an institution that now commemorates its 30 years of existence in Macau and activity in Asia.

If in 2015 there were only 23 hours of tutorials, in 2018 there were 289, compared to 520 this year.

“When we ask in the application forms why, we notice that many of the interested parties are, for example, entrepreneurs who want to invest in Portugal or in a Portuguese-speaking country,” said the director, who has been in office since August 2018.

Read more in Macau Business.