The number of people who acquired nationality in an EU state, fell an average of 17% during the year 2016 - 2017 and 28% in Portugal, according to data released by Eurostat.
In total, 825,000 people acquired nationality in one of the 28 EU member states, down from 841,000 in the previous year.
Portugal is one of the 13 states that follow the downward trend of the EU, with the number of people granted nationality, down 28% to 18,022 despite government efforts to attract more citizens to help couter the grinding demograpic trend of more pensioners and fewer taxpayers.
In Portugal, nationality was granted to Brazilians (33.8%), followed by Cape Verdeans (14.4%) and Ukrainians (10.6%).
In the EU, Morocco (8.2%) was the main country of origin for new European citizens, followed by Albania (7.1%) and India (3.8%).