I was just handed a thought provoking article about the immense discrepancy of living on a big city. Although there are many upsides to that, we're seeing that people want to escape from it but cannot due to lack of infrastructures in less densely populated areas. Focusing on Portugal recent data shows that 42% of the population lives in 5% of the territory. To make matters worse, in 2015 the UN predicts that over 69% of the Portuguese population will live in the two major metropolitan areas: Lisbon and Oporto.

Although I'm not the one with a solution for that problem, this hits home with me because for years I've been advocating the need to create a real technology hub in some rural area of Portugal. This would need to be an artificial conglomerate, much like Silicon Valley.

The TGV (high speed train - or as I like to call it rails broadband haha) is just around the corner and can serve as a catalyst for such an initiative as it not only takes care of the transportation part but it also allows to create something right in the middle of two European capitals: Lisbon and Madrid. Because of that, it should be able to attract people from both countries and from there start a snowball effect, maybe enough to attract people from other countries.

The Portuguese government would of course need to offer some incentives to drag people and companies outside of their comfort zones: lower taxes, maybe even tax exemption on technology products bought on the first years of a startup's life, start a few initiatives for construction works (housing, office spaces and whatnot), infrastructure (fiber to the win!),etc. I'm usually not one to bank on the government to do something but this seems to fall exactly under their area of action.

I'm bubbling with ideas, much more than my poor English skills allow me to write, but what do you think of this? Does it make sense?