How Portugal Became Europe's Top Medical Cannabis Exporter

August 16, 2026

Photo by Cannafornia via Pexels.

Portugal's cannabis industry sold its own citizens about EUR 280,000 worth of medical product in 2025. In that same year, Portuguese facilities shipped more than 55,000 kilograms of cannabis abroad. Put those two numbers side by side and the picture is unambiguous: this is not a country building a domestic medical program with a side business in exports. It's an export-processing operation that happens to be located inside a country with a small, mostly unused medical cannabis law.

Five years ago that wouldn't have seemed plausible. Portugal was a minor player next to the Netherlands, and cultivation footprints in Denmark and Malta got more attention from industry analysts. Now Portugal ships more medical cannabis out of its ports and airports than any other country in Europe, having overtaken longer-established rivals in the space of about three years. The reasons aren't mysterious once you look at them individually -- a Mediterranean-adjacent climate that makes greenhouse growing cheap, EU membership that simplifies intra-bloc trade, and a licensing pathway that, however slow-moving on paper, gave multinational operators a clear set of rules to build against. What follows is a look at how the legal architecture, the export curve, the companies doing the growing, and the regulatory tightening now underway all connect -- and why the domestic side of this market barely registers at all.

The Legal Foundation: Law 33/2018 and What Came After

Photo by Artur Roman via Pexels.

The legal basis for all of this traces back to a single piece of legislation: Law No. 33/2018, passed on 18 July 2018, which authorized the use of cannabis and cannabis-derived products for medical purposes in Portugal. It was a relatively narrow bill focused on patient access, not an industrial policy document, but it opened the door that everything else walked through. Decree-Law No. 8/2019, issued the following January, filled in the operational detail the original law left out -- how products would be authorized for the market, what counted as a qualifying cannabis preparation, and how the new regime would sit alongside Portugal's existing medicines framework.

The piece that actually built the export machine came a couple of years later. Ministerial Order 83/2021, published on 15 April 2021, set out the licensing and prescription rules in detail, covering cultivation, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, transport, import and export as distinct, separately licensed activities. That structure matters: a company doesn't get one broad cannabis license in Portugal, it accumulates a stack of narrower ones depending on what part of the supply chain it wants to touch.

Overseeing all of it is INFARMED, Portugal's national medicines and health products authority, which authorizes every cultivator, manufacturer, importer and exporter individually rather than issuing sector-wide approvals. And because Portugal is a signatory to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, that oversight extends down to the level of individual shipments. There's no such thing as a standing export license that covers ongoing trade with a given buyer -- every consignment leaving the country needs its own INFARMED-issued export authorization, cross-referenced against an import permit on the receiving end. It's a slow, paperwork-heavy system by design, built for a treaty regime meant to track narcotics one movement at a time. That it now processes tens of thousands of kilograms a year is arguably the most striking part of the whole story.

From 4,850 Kilos to Over 55,000: The Export Curve

Portugal's medical cannabis exports surged from 4,850 kg in 2020 to 32,558 kg in 2024, with growth accelerating sharply in the final year as exports nearly tripled from 2023 levels.

The numbers tell their own story, and they accelerate in a way that's hard to overstate. Portugal exported 4,850 kilograms of medical cannabis in 2020, climbed to 5,694 kg in 2021, then to 9,271 kg in 2022, then to 11,973 kg in 2023 -- a steady, unspectacular upward line that looked like normal industry maturation. Then 2024 happened: exports jumped 172% to 32,558 kilograms, a single-year leap that pushed Portugal past every other EU producer and made it, for the first time, Europe's largest medical cannabis exporter.

2025 didn't slow down -- it compounded. Between January and August alone, Portugal exported more cannabis than it had in the entirety of 2024. By year's end, full-year figures reportedly topped 55,000 kilograms, putting the country on a trajectory that outpaces even its own record-breaking prior year by a wide margin.

Where does it all go? Germany absorbs roughly 46% of Portuguese exports, by far the largest single destination, followed by Spain at about 20%, Poland at 16%, the UK at 10% and Australia taking around 5%. That concentration on Germany isn't incidental -- it tracks almost exactly with Germany's own prescription boom following its 2024 cannabis reforms, which loosened doctor-access rules and sent demand for imported medical flower sharply upward. Portugal became the supply valve for that demand.

There's a wrinkle worth noting, too: Portugal isn't purely a cultivation origin point. A meaningful share of the raw material processed and re-exported from Portuguese facilities, particularly the flow headed toward Germany, actually originates in Canada. Portuguese sites function partly as a processing and re-export hub for Canadian-grown product, not solely a cultivation base of first origin -- which complicates the simple story of Portugal as a grower and positions it more accurately as a logistics and processing chokepoint for the transatlantic medical cannabis trade.

Who's Growing It: From Tilray's Coimbra Plant to a Crowded License List

Photo by StuBaileyPhoto via Pixabay.

The license rolls give a sense of how crowded this space has become. As of October 2025, INFARMED had issued licenses to 38 cultivators, 26 manufacturers, 162 importers, 158 exporters and 258 wholesale distributors -- a lot of paper for a country whose domestic patient base is measured in the low thousands. International Narcotics Control Board data places Portugal as the EU's second-largest medical cannabis producer behind Spain, with required cultivation volume estimated at around 32 tonnes for 2024, up roughly fivefold from 6.5 tonnes the year before.

Tilray operates one of the anchor facilities behind those numbers, a large cultivation and processing site in Coimbra that has become central to the company's European supply chain. Tilray reported 36% growth in international cannabis revenue in its second fiscal quarter of 2026, and executives have pointed repeatedly to Portugal as the production base making that growth possible -- flower grown and processed there feeds directly into the German and broader EU distribution networks described above.

RPK Biopharma, the parent company behind the Holigen and Flowr brands, runs large-scale greenhouse operations of its own, supplying product across the European market at a scale that puts it among the handful of companies actually driving Portugal's export totals rather than merely holding a license.

What draws these companies to Portugal specifically, beyond the regulatory pathway, comes down to basic agronomics. Portugal's climate supports greenhouse cultivation with far lower supplemental lighting and heating costs than an indoor grow in the Netherlands, Germany or Denmark would require. Sunlight is closer to free; energy is not, and in Northern Europe energy costs have been a persistent drag on cannabis production economics. A greenhouse outside Coimbra or in the Alentejo doesn't need to fight the climate the way a facility near Copenhagen does, and that difference shows up directly in production cost per gram -- which is ultimately what determines whether a multinational builds its EU supply base in Portugal or somewhere colder.

Tighter Rules on Paper: GMP Certificates, Digitization and License Pulls

Photo by Pilan Filmes via Pexels.

Growth this fast tends to outrun the systems built to regulate it, and INFARMED's recent moves suggest the agency knows it. The regulator now requires scan-verifiable EU-GMP or PIC/S GMP certificates attached to every single import and export authorization -- a step up from earlier practice, and one that puts real documentation weight on companies at the exact moment their shipment volumes are climbing fastest.

Beyond certificates, INFARMED has started reviewing product-specific stability data more closely and is mandating supply chain planning buffers of eight to twelve weeks before shipments can move -- effectively forcing companies to build lead time into export planning rather than treating permits as a same-week formality. Given that Single Convention rules already require a fresh authorization for every shipment, this adds a meaningful new layer of lag to a system that was already procedurally heavy.

To handle the sheer volume of permit requests now coming through -- a byproduct of a market that grew more than tenfold in five years -- INFARMED has announced plans to digitize its licensing and authorization system, moving away from what has reportedly been a largely manual, paper-heavy review process.

Enforcement has followed the tightening rhetoric with actual license pulls. Several companies lost their authorizations in late 2025 and early 2026, including Cannacare, which had its license revoked in March 2026. These aren't necessarily signs of fraud or scandal so much as evidence that the compliance bar has risen faster than some smaller operators could adapt to -- GMP certification, traceability documentation and stability testing all cost money and staff time that a marginal license holder may not have.

Read together, these moves look less like a crackdown and more like a regulator trying to retrofit a framework -- one designed in 2018 and 2019 around a boutique domestic medical program -- into something capable of overseeing an industrial-scale export sector it never anticipated building.

A Domestic Market That Barely Exists

Photo by Etatics Inc. via Pexels.

Set against all that export volume, Portugal's domestic medical cannabis market looks almost like a rounding error. Portuguese doctors wrote just 460 medical cannabis prescriptions in 2021. That number rose to 1,157 by 2023 -- growth, but growth from a very small base. Through the first three quarters of 2024, only 757 prescriptions had been issued nationally, a pace that suggests domestic uptake has flattened rather than accelerated.

The revenue figures make the disconnect even starker. Total domestic medical cannabis sales in Portugal came to roughly EUR 280,000 in 2025 -- a figure that, converted into product volume, represents a tiny fraction of a single percent of the more than 55,000 kilograms that left the country the same year. Portugal's cannabis sector, in other words, wasn't built to treat Portuguese patients. It was built to process and export product to markets where prescribing is easier and demand is already established.

Germany is the obvious point of comparison, and the contrast explains a lot about why Portuguese product heads north rather than staying home. Germany's prescription volumes have grown substantially since its 2024 reforms loosened the rules around doctor access to medical cannabis, removing some of the bureaucratic friction that keeps prescribing low in countries like Portugal. Portuguese doctors still operate under a more conservative prescribing culture and a narrower set of approved indications, and patient awareness of medical cannabis as an option remains limited outside specialist clinics.

The result is a lopsided industry by design rather than by accident: cultivation and processing licensed and regulated inside Portugal, but the actual patient market -- the prescriptions, the pharmacies, the reimbursement conversations -- happening almost entirely somewhere else. Portugal grows the flower; other countries treat the patients.

Strip away the growth charts and Portugal's position rests on a foundation narrower than the export figures suggest. It depends on shipment-by-shipment permits issued under a 63-year-old UN drug treaty, on Germany continuing to expand its prescription market at the current pace, and on Canadian growers continuing to feed raw material into Portuguese processing facilities for re-export. Any one of those three legs weakening -- a German policy reversal, a Canadian supply disruption, or INFARMED simply slowing its permit throughput -- would show up in the export numbers almost immediately.

The tightening already underway at INFARMED points toward consolidation rather than collapse. GMP certification requirements, stability data reviews and multi-week planning buffers cost money that a small license holder with modest volume can't easily absorb, and the license revocations already seen in Cannacare and others are likely a preview rather than an anomaly. Expect the field of 158 exporters and 38 cultivators to thin out over the next few years, with volume concentrating further into operators like Tilray and RPK Biopharma that have the capital and compliance infrastructure to keep up.

The more interesting question isn't whether Portugal can grow more cannabis -- clearly it can, and quickly. It's whether a regulatory system designed in 2018 and 2019 for a small domestic medical program, one built around individual patient prescriptions and modest volumes, can keep functioning honestly as the country becomes something closer to an industrial EU supply depot. Portugal didn't set out to become Europe's cannabis warehouse. It became one because the climate was cheap, the EU trade rules were convenient, and a slow bureaucratic process turned out to be scalable in ways nobody quite planned for. Whether that scaling holds up under closer scrutiny is the story to watch next.