| Summary: | Besides receiving large numbers of tourists, the Algarve is also becoming home to growing communities of migrants whose first language is not Portuguese. Besides the so-called “economic migrants” who have arrived from eastern European countries, attracted by the employment opportunities in construction and the service sectors that have resulted from the development of mass tourism, there are also growing numbers of northern European “lifestyle migrants” in search of a better way of life in the sun. The transformations in the ethnoscape of the region due to these tourism-related mobilities have impacted on its semiotic landscape. Notably, English is seemingly everywhere, whilst the languages of the eastern European migrant communities are almost entirely absent. In this paper, I explore how some of the texts that appear in the semiotic landscape can be viewed as nexus points for various circulating discursive practices. Such practices are spatially and temporally embedded in a dialectical relationship with the politics of place and, ultimately, contribute to the discursive construction of the inclusion/exclusion of different social groups.
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