115 flights to Portugal. There is one word for why she returns

In 2018 the staff at Faro airport were waiting for one particular arrival from England. Off it came Margaret Thompson, a retired primary-school teacher, and the head of Algarve tourism and the head of the airport itself met her with a bunch of flowers . The reason was simple: someone at the apartments where she has stayed for years had checked the dates and worked out that this trip would be her hundredth.

She first flew to Portugal in 1973. Not on her own: with Peter, her husband, the two of them landing in Lisbon that first time . Six years after those flowers, in May 2024, she landed at Faro again, this time at ninety-two . That tally raises two questions at once: why does someone return to the same place a hundred and fifteen times, and why do you have a place like that too, when nobody is making you go?

She arrived at that address in stages. The Algarve entered her calendar in 1978: the Ventura apartments in Lagos, two weeks for two hundred and seventy-eight pounds . Praia da Luz came only in 1993, and she has been checking into the same apartments ever since, in May 2024 for the forty-sixth time . Thirty-one years at a single address. This is how often she has flown in that direction:

The obvious answer is habit. You probably have your own version of that answer for whatever you keep repeating. Someone finds a good place once and stops looking; the calendar handles the rest. Habit, though, asks nobody permission, and here permission had to be given again every single time. Peter, the man she started going with, died in 1982 . She bought the tickets without him for four more decades, and every one of those forty-six stays in Luz began with a decision taken alone.

There is a second crack in that answer. Habit fastens onto things that stay put, and the Praia da Luz of her first visits looks nothing like today's. In the spring of 2024 a local Algarve monthly asked her what Luz had been like when she first arrived. She answered in English, the language every conversation of hers here runs in .

It was just rocks and fishing boats. There was nothing here at all.— Margaret Thompson, on Praia da Luz at first arrival[7]

Nothing survives from that description except the name. Even the apartments have moved on: their balconies were added later . Going back every year to a place that looks different each time is an act of a wholly different kind from staying in a groove. Which leaves the second explanation, the one most people reach for straight away: sentiment. Longing as the symptom of a loss nobody ever walked out of.

If longing were only a symptom, languages would file it as one and move on. Two cultures at the western edge of Europe did the opposite: since the Middle Ages they have kept separate words for the feeling and let nobody narrow them. On the Portuguese side the word is saudade. A peer-reviewed entry describes it as a profound sense of longing, nostalgia, or melancholy tied to absence, loss, or the unattainable, and adds that you cannot lift the word out of the culture it grew in . Every word of that checks out. And it still fails to say why a ninety-two-year-old keeps packing a suitcase in the same direction.

The word's fiercest defenders are the people who make their living from it. Fado is the Portuguese song about what does not come back: one voice, a guitar and a story that has already happened. Mariza, one of its best-known singers, born in Mozambique, learned the music in the tavern her parents kept, and she speaks of fado as a living school of music in the neighbourhood where she grew up . The genre that has carried saudade for generations entered UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011 . Asked what fado is actually about, she answered with a list on which sadness comes almost last .

In fado, you can sing about joy, love, lost love, jealousy, happiness, sadness, as well as saudade—every part of being human.— Mariza, fado singer[12]

Sadness is one item among many there, and saudade stands on its own, like a colour missing from the basic palette. People who sing the feeling for a living resist having it read as an ailment. Which leaves the question of what it is instead, and one place where a word says most about itself: the root.

The most widely accepted origin of saudade is the Latin solitas, that is, solitude; alongside it the entry records other candidates, among them salute and the Arabic saudah . Etymology is rarely this literal. The word for missing a place and its people grew out of the word for being alone, which puts the sequence the other way round from the intuitive one: first somebody is left on their own, and only then does the longing start. Hold on to that order, because psychology got round to measuring it a great deal later.

The oldest written records are medieval Galician-Portuguese songs . Then came the age of discovery, and saudade grew on both sides of the quay: among those who sailed and among those who stayed . Whoever stayed knew the day of departure and never the day of return. Margaret knows both dates in advance, and that is the whole of the difference.

The second witness in the same case lives a little further north. Saudade grew up on the seam of Portugal and Galicia, and on the Galician side of that seam it has a sister: morriña. The Real Academia Española defines it as “tristeza o melancolía, especialmente la nostalgia de la tierra natal”, sadness or melancholy, above all homesickness for the native land, and it traces the word to the Galician-Portuguese noun morrinha . The definition is dry; history supplies the scale. The historian Antonio Eiras Roel counted everyone who left this region for the Americas between 1836 and 1960; at the peak of that wave, emigration per head outstripped Ireland's .

That longing did not stay in the nineteenth century. In Avión, a village in the province of Ourense, voters registered abroad outnumber the residents at home; it is the widest such gap in Spain . In summer the village fills up again, because the diaspora comes home . Two neighbouring languages keep separate words for this, and once a year an entire village does what Margaret does on her own.

In Luz she has her people. Miguel and Rita at the newsagent's have known her for twenty-five years, Luís Vicente has driven her to and from the airport for eighteen, and at the apartments there are Bethany at reception, Ana who cleans, and Claire who runs the place; in the interview Margaret names them one by one, as friends . This is where the definitions come apart a second time: longing for a place turns out, in practice, to be longing for the people who greet her as if she had only stepped out for a moment.

And this is exactly the point where the research turns the direction common sense expects. In 2008 Zhou's team demonstrated a chain that reads like a paradox: loneliness lowers the sense of social support yet raises nostalgia, and nostalgia rebuilds that sense of support in turn . What was measured matters here: participants rated their own perception of support, so what nostalgia rebuilds is the conviction that there are people around you. The Southampton research programme has a name for this: nostalgia as a resource . It used to be written up as an illness; in this data it looks like a first-aid kit. Latin got there first, having started from solitas.

If longing repairs the sense of support, the trip itself ought to be the payoff. Nawijn's team tested that in the Netherlands, comparing people heading off on holiday with people staying home . The travellers turned out happier before the trip had even begun, before a single suitcase was packed; the authors suspect anticipation itself. The difference is small, barely visible on a five-point scale, and that is exactly why it rings true: this is what it looks like in the data when you fall asleep thinking “three more weeks”.

Then the same team checked what happens after the return, and there the promise breaks: for most people happiness snaps back to its old level almost at once, however long the trip was . Only genuinely restful holidays leave an afterglow, and even that carries a use-by date. If a holiday adds nothing lasting to the happiness column, why does Margaret get on that plane a forty-sixth time?

Because the return credits an entirely different account. What sits in that account is the sense of having a place of your own and people in it, which is precisely what Zhou's chain says nostalgia rebuilds. Most of the charge is carried by the waiting, so the date in the diary weighs more than the days on the beach. Kemp's team adds one more piece: forty-nine students texted a daily report on their mood, the holidays lasted a week on average, and afterwards the length of the trip made no difference to how the whole was rated . Small sample, short trips, so let us not stretch it over half a century of returns. The modest version is enough: what survives a holiday is a handful of its strongest hours and the fact that there is something to come back to.

Then there is the taste of the whole operation. Larsen's team showed in 2001 that joy and sadness can happen at the same time; it was measured in viewers of the film Life Is Beautiful, in students moving out of their dormitories, in graduates on graduation day . The last evening of any holiday knows the feeling by heart: the suitcase already packed, next year's booking already sitting in the phone. Saudade never has to choose between grief and gratitude, and perhaps that is why it lasts for decades. American time-use studies, meanwhile, show that married couples now spend more hours with each other than they did in the 1960s, though the peak of time spent strictly as a pair fell in 1975, and by 2012 twenty-one minutes a day had gone from it . Shared time is counted in minutes, and minutes leak. Margaret's unit is a date that never moves.

Hence a working definition that no dictionary carries. Saudade: a loyalty that has outlived its reason. A longing that tends to places and people instead of trying to wind back time; it rises quietly like leaven until a ticket grows out of it. Understood that way, it is something you do: you go and check that the place still stands and the people are still there. Margaret arrived at this without a laboratory. In the interview where all those numbers were counted out , she says: “I usually tell my friends to come.” Longing of that kind pulls up extra chairs.

Which makes this personal. That repeating thing you do every year or every week, the same café, the same table by the window, the same walk down to the water, the same week in the same place, looks from the outside like a rut. From the inside something else is going on: your mind is topping up the sense that you belong somewhere and to someone. If you want more of that, the cheapest route runs through the calendar. Fix the date, and write to the person you share the place with, even a single word: again?

At Faro airport that day, nobody had to ask her why she keeps coming. The bouquet came from people who had been counting her returns alongside her .