The Daily Mail’s Richard Eden has got a scoop! He has an exclusive and he’s blaring it as loudly as he can. No, this is not some exclusive reporting on King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Australian flop tour. It’s also not about the Princess of Wales’s missing engagement ring, or Prince William’s mysterious weight loss. It’s not about poor Duchess Sophie and why royal reporters forget to cover her and her tours. No, Eden’s critical, journalistic eye will never deign to cover any of the left-behind Windsors. Instead, his big scoop is about some real estate purchased by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were evicted from their cottage at Windsor by King Charles, they were left without a home in this country. The California-based couple have, however, ensured that they retain a foothold on this side of the Atlantic.

The Daily Mail understands that Prince Harry and Meghan have bought a home in Portugal.

They are not the only royals who have a Portuguese property, with Harry’s cousin Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, owning a home in the CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club, a luxury development of 300 properties by the sea in Melides, south of the Portuguese capital, Lisbon. Mr Brooksbank, 38, works in marketing and sales for CostaTerra. He, Eugenie, 34, and their two sons, August, three, and Ernest, 16 months, split their time between Portugal and London.

The purchase of the home in Portugal may have allowed the Sussexes to acquire a so-called Golden Visa, under which they would have visa-free access to the European Union’s Schengen area. This could have been a major attraction to Meghan, who is a US citizen. When the couple got engaged in November 2017, Kensington Palace said Meghan would apply for British citizenship in due course, with a spokesman confirming that ‘she will go through the process [which] takes a number of years’.

Last year, it was reported that the Sussexes enjoyed a ‘romantic three-night break’ in Portugal after attending the Invictus Games in Germany. The couple are said to have flown from Dusseldorf to Lisbon before travelling an hour south to Melides in a ‘mega-secret’ operation. A source close to the Sussexes confirmed that they had been to Portugal. At the time, it was thought that they stayed with Eugenie and Mr Brooksbank, who have visited them at their home in Montecito, California.

[From The Daily Mail]

You can get an EU visa just by buying property in Portugal? I thought that was only for Monaco – as in, if you can afford an apartment in Monte Carlo, bam, you get citizenship in Monaco and an EU passport. I just looked it up though… Portugal’s Golden Visa program was phased out last year. So… I don’t know. When did H&M buy property in Europe? The “Schengen area” is basically all of continental EU countries. Which… doesn’t mean anything for the UK, because of Brexit. It would be hilarious if Harry and Meghan intentionally bought real estate in Portugal just so they could acquire EU passports and they would still not bother visiting England whatsoever.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Backgrid.