Where do Évora's 650 international students file their residence papers now? On campus
The University of Évora and AIMA have opened a CLAIM office in the Santo Agostinho building, staffed by two people trained to file cases directly in the agency's system. Biometrics are still collected in Lisbon.
Studying in Évora on a non-EU passport used to mean solving the first step of your residence process 130 kilometres away. Not any more. On Wednesday the University of Évora and AIMA opened a CLAIM office — the local migrant integration support centre — in the Santo Agostinho building, and it began operating the same day.
Two university staff run it, trained by AIMA to work directly inside the agency’s case system. This is not an information desk. Cases are now filed on campus.
What it does, and what it does not
Once a case is filed there, it moves to AIMA’s central services, which issue the decision. Biometric data is still collected afterwards at the agency’s premises in Lisbon. So the trip has not disappeared — it has simply stopped being the first thing that has to happen, and the first step is where these processes usually stall.
Rector António Candeias put numbers to the need. The university has around 650 international students, roughly 600 of them from outside the European Union, and its foreign academic community, counting lecturers, researchers and staff, comes from more than 80 countries. The protocol with AIMA was signed back in October 2025, under the previous rectory.
A wider network than you would guess
Pedro Portugal Gaspar, who chairs AIMA’s board, says there are about 100 municipal CLAIM offices and close to 50 run by associations and civil society bodies. In higher education the network is approaching ten. They do not all do the same job: some handle document processing, as this one does, while others focus on information and social integration.
There is a second aim behind the first. The university wants to make it easier to bring in foreign lecturers and researchers for short stays — a master’s module, a single course unit — without paperwork making the decision for them.
In a later phase, the institution wants to test the office’s capacity and extend the service to the wider migrant population of Évora and the region, working with the city council and the Santa Casa da Misericórdia.
If you have a case in progress, read this alongside our running AIMA tracker and, if you are a student, the new student visa rules that took effect this month. Institutional detail for students coming from abroad is on the University of Évora’s international students page.
Image: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
